Is it likely to have germinated in the brain of an ape? and if so, of what possible use would it be in the struggle of a merely physical existence? Is it not rather the remnant of a better spiritual life—a remembrance of the tree of life that grew in the paradise of God, a link of connection of the spiritual nature in man with, a higher Divine Spirit above? Life and immortality, it is true, were brought to light by Jesus Christ, but they existed as beliefs more or less obscure from the first, and formed the basis for good and evil of the religions of the world. Around this idea were gathered multitudes of collateral beliefs and religious observances; feasts and festivals for the dead; worship of dead heroes and ancestors; priestly intercessions and sacrifices for the dead; costly rites of sepulture. Vain and without foundation many of these have no doubt been, but they have formed a universal and costly testimony to an instinct of immortality, dimly glimmering even in the breast of the savage, and glowing with higher brightness in the soul of the Christian, but separated by an impassable gulf from anything derivable from a brute ancestry.
The theistic picture of primeval man is in harmony with the fact that men, as a whole, are, and always have been, believers in God. The evolutionist picture is not. If man had from the first not merely a physical and intellectual nature, but a spiritual nature as well, we can understand how he came into relation with God, and how through all his vagaries and corruptions he clings to this relation in one form or another; but evolution affords no link of connection of this kind. It holds God to be unknowable even to the cultivated intellect of philosophy, and perceives no use in ideas with relation to Him which, according to it must necessarily be fallacious, It leaves the theistic notions of mankind without explanation, and it will not serve its purpose to assert that some few and exceptional families of men have no notion of a God. Even admitting this, and it is at best very doubtful, it can form but a trifling exception to a general truth.
It appears to me that this view of the case is very clearly put in the Bible, and it is curiously illustrated by a recent critique of “Mr. Darwin’s Critics,” by Professor Huxley in the Contemporary Review. Mr. Mivart, himself a derivationist, but differing in some points from Darwin, had affirmed, in the spirit rather of a Romish theologian than of a Biblical student or philosopher, that “acts unaccompanied by mental acts of conscious will” are “absolutely destitute of the most incipient degree of goodness.” Huxley well replies, “It is to my understanding extremely hard to reconcile Mr. Mivart’s dictum with that noble summary of the whole duty of man, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ According to Mr. Mivart’s definition, the man who loves God and his neighbour, and, out of sheer love and affection for both, does all he can to please them, is nevertheless destitute of a particle of real goodness.” Huxley’s reply deserves to be pondered by certain moralists and theologians whose doctrine savours of the leaven of the Pharisees, but neither Huxley nor his opponent see the higher truth that in the love of God we have a principle far nobler and more God-like and less animal than that of mere duty. Man primeval, according to the doctrine of Genesis, was, by simple love and communion with his God, placed in the position of a spiritual being, a member of a higher family than that of the animal. The “knowledge of good and evil” which he acquired later, and on which is based the law of conscious duty, was a less happy attainment, which placed him on a lower level than that of the unconscious love and goodness of primal innocence. No doubt man’s sense of right and wrong is something above the attainment of animals, and which could never have sprung from them; but still more is this the case with his direct spiritual relation to God, which, whether it rises to the inspiration of the prophet or the piety of the Christian, or sinks to the rude superstition of the savage, can be no part of the Adam of the dust but only of the breath of life breathed into him from above.
That man should love his fellow-man may not seem strange. Certain social and gregarious and family instincts exist among the lower animals, and Darwin very ably adduces these as akin to the similar affections of man; yet even in the law of love of our neighbour, as enforced by Christ’s teaching, it is easy to see that we have something beyond animal nature. But this becomes still more distinct in the love of God. Man was the “shadow and likeness of God,” says the old record in Genesis—the shadow that clings to the substance and is inseparable from it, the likeness that represents it visibly to the eyes of men, and of the animals that man rules over. Primeval man could “hear in the evening breeze the voice of God, walking to and fro in the garden.” What mere animal ever had or could attain to such an experience?
But if we turn from the Edenic picture of man in harmony with Heaven—“owning a father, when he owned a God”—to man as the slave of superstition; even in this terrible darkness of mistaken faith, of which it may be said,
“Fear mates her devils, and weak faith her gods,
Gods partial, changeful, passionate, unjust,
Whose attributes are rage, revenge, or lust,”
we see the ruins, at least, of that sublime love of God. The animal clings to its young with a natural affection, as great as that of a human mother for her child, but what animal ever thought of throwing its progeny into the Ganges, or into the fires of Moloch’s altar, for the saving of its soul, or to obtain the favour or avoid the wrath of God? No less in the vagaries of fetichism, ritualism, and idolatry, and in the horrors of asceticism and human sacrifice, than in the Edenic communion with and hearing of God, or in the joy of Christian love, do we see, in however ruined or degraded condition, the higher spiritual nature of man.
This point leads to another distinction which, when properly viewed, widens the gap between man and the animals, or at least destroys one of the frail bridges of the evolutionists. Lubbock and others affect to believe that the lowest savages of the modern world must be nearest to the type of primeval man. I have already attempted to show the fallacy of this. I may add here that in so holding they overlook a fundamental distinction, well pointed out by the Duke of Argyll, between the capacity of acquiring knowledge
and knowledge actually acquired, and between
the possession of a higher rational nature and the exercise of that nature in the pursuit of mechanical arts. In other words, primeval man must not be held to have been “utterly barbarous” because he was ignorant of mining or navigation, or of sculpture and painting. He had in him the power to attain to these things, but so long as he was not under necessity to exercise it, his mind may have expended its powers in other and happier channels. As well might it be affirmed that a delicately nurtured lady is an “utter barbarian” because she cannot build her own house, or make her own shoes. No doubt in such work she would be far more helpless than the wife of the rudest savage, yet she is not on that account to be held as an inferior being, or nearer to the animals. Our conception of an angelic nature implies the absence of all our social institutions and mechanical arts; but does this necessitate our regarding an angel as an "utter barbarian"? In short, the whole notion of civilisation held by Lubbock and those who think with him, is not only low and degrading, but utterly and absurdly wrong; and of course it vitiates all their conceptions of primeval man as well as of man’s future destiny. Further, the theistic idea implies that man was, without exhausting toil, to regulate and control nature, to rule over the animals, to cultivate the earth, to extend himself over it and subdue it; and all this as compatible with moral innocence, and at the same time with high intellectual and spiritual activity.
There is, however, a still nicer and more beautiful distinction involved in this, and included in the wonderful narrative in Genesis, so simple yet so much more profound than our philosophies; and which crops out in the same discussion of the critics of Darwin, to which I have already referred. A writer in the Quarterly Review had attempted to distinguish human reason from the intelligence of animals, as involving self-consciousness and reflection in our sensations and perceptions. Huxley objects to this, instancing the mental action of a greyhound when it sees and pursues a hare, as similar to that of the gamekeeper when he lets slip the hound.[BG]
[BG] Contemporary Review, November, 1871, p. 461.