We examine two paper-mills. The one is situated in a gooseberry-bush, and the owner is a wasp. The other covers some acres of land, and belongs to a kind-hearted and popular legislator. But after exploring the latter with all its water-wheels and steam-engines, and with all the beautiful expedients for converting rags into pulp, and then weaving and sizing, and cutting and drying, and folding and packing, we go away admiring nothing except human skill; whereas, the moment Madam Vespa fetches a bundle of vegetable fibres and moistens them with her saliva, and then spreads them out in a patch of whitey-brown, we lift our hands in amazement, and go home to write another “Bridgewater Treatise,” or to add a new meditation to Sturm. That a wasp should make paper at all is very wonderful; but if the rude fabric which she compiles from raspings of wood is wonderful, how much more admirable is that texture which, as it flows from between these flying cylinders for furlongs together, becomes a fit repository for the story of the universe, and can receive on its delicate and evenly expanse, not only the musings of genius but the pictures of Prophecy and the lessons of Inspiration!
However, it is said, the cases are quite distinct. Man has reason to guide him; the lower animal proceeds by instinct. In surveying human handiwork, we admire the resources of reason; in looking at bird architecture or insect manufactures, we are in more direct contact with the Infinite Mind. Their Maker is their teacher, but man is his own instructor; and, therefore, we see the wisdom and goodness of God in the operations of the lower animals more clearly than in our own.
Without arguing the identity of reason and instinct, it will be admitted that the lower animals frequently perform actions which imply a reasoning process. Reverting to our insect illustrations, Huber and others have mentioned cases which make it hard to deny judgment and reflection to the wasp; and the reader who is himself “judicious” will not refuse a tiny measure of his own endowments to the bee. On a bright day, four or five summers since, we were gazing at a clump of fuchsias planted out on a lawn, not far from London. As every one knows, the flower of the fuchsia is a graceful pendent, something like a funnel or red coral suspended with the opening downward; and in the varieties planted on this lawn the tube of the funnel was long and slender. In the case of every expanded flower, we noticed that there was a small hole near the apex, just as if some one had pierced it with a pin. It was not long till we detected the authors of these perforations. The border was all alive with bees, and we soon noticed that in dealing with the fuchsias they extracted the honey through these artificial apertures. They had found the tube of the blossom so long that their haustella could not reach the honey at its farther end; and so, by this engineering stratagem, they got at it sideways. Surely this was sensible. When a mason releases a sweep stuck fast in a chimney by digging a hole in the gable, or when a chancellor of the exchequer gains a revenue by indirect taxation, he merely carries out the principle. And what makes the manœuvre more striking, is the fact that the problem was new. The fuchsias had come from Mexico and Chili not many years ago; whereas the bees were derived from a long line of English ancestors, and could not have learned the art of tapping from their American congeners. In cases such as these, and hundreds which might be quoted, no one feels his admiration of the all-pervading Wisdom lessen as instinct approaches reason, or actually merges in it. In the case of the inferior animals no one feels—The more of reason, the less of God. And, because man is all reason together, why should it be thought that in human inventions and operations there is nothing divine? How is it that in the dyke-building of that beaver, or the nest building of that bird, so many mark the varied evolutions of the Supreme Intelligence; but, when they come to the operations of the artisan or the architect, they are conscious of an abrupt transition, and, feeling the groundless holy, they exclaim,
“God made the country, but man made the town?”
One would think that the right way to regard human handiwork is with the feelings which an accomplished naturalist expresses:—“A reference to the Deity, even through works of human invention, must lead to increased brotherly love among mankind. When we see a mechanic working at his trade, and observe the dexterity which he displays, together with the ingenious adaptation of his tools to their various uses, and then consider the original source of all this, do we not see a being at work, employing for his own purposes an intelligence derived from the Almighty?—and will not such a consideration serve to raise him in our opinion, rather than induce us to look down slightingly upon him for being employed in a mechanical trade? For my own part, when I watch a mechanic at his work I find it very agreeable, and, I believe, a very useful kind of mental employment, to think of him as I would of an insect building its habitation, and in both see the workings of the Deity.”[[7]]
And yet it must be admitted that few have the feelings which Mr. Drummond describes. They cannot see as much of God in the manipulations of the mechanic as in the operations of the bird or the beaver; nor can a life-boat send their thoughts upward so readily as the shell of a nautilus or the float of a raft-building spider.
The difference is mainly moral. Man is sinful. Many of his works are constructed with sinful motives, and are destined for evil purposes. And the artificer is often a wicked man. We know this, and when we look on man’s works we cannot help remembering this. It is a pure pleasure to watch a hive of bees, but it is not so pleasant to survey a sugar plantation in Brazil, there is a painful thought in knowing how much of their produce will be manufactured into intoxicating liquors. It is pleasant to observe the paper-making of a hymenopterous insect; for it does not swear nor use bad language at its work, and, when finished, its tissues will not be blotted by effusions of impiety and vice; but of this you can seldom be assured in the more splendid manufactures of us lords of the creation. But if this element were guaranteed—if the will of God were done among ourselves even as it is done among the high artificers of heaven and among the humble laborers in earth’s deep places—our feelings should be wholly revolutionized. If of every stately fabric we knew, as we know regarding St. Paul’s, that no profane word had been uttered all the time of its construction; if of every factory we could hope, as of the mills at Lowell, that it is meant to be the reward of good conduct and the gymnasium of intelligence and virtue; if of every fine painting or statue we might believe that, like Michael Angelo’s works, it was commenced in prayer; this suffusion of the moral over the mechanical would sanctify the Arts, and in Devotion’s breast it would kindle the conviction, at once joyful and true, “My Father made them all.”
Still, however, in man’s works, we are bound to distinguish these two things—the mechanical and the moral. When God made man at first, he made him both upright and intelligent; he endowed him with both goodness and genius. In his fall he has lost a large amount of both attributes; but whatever measure of either he retains is still divine. Any dim instincts of devotion, as well as every benevolent affection which lingers in man’s nature are relics of his first estate; and so is any portion of intellectual power which he still possesses. Too often they exist asunder. In our self-entailed economy of defect and disorder, too often are the genius and the goodness divided. Too many of our good men want cleverness, and too many clever men are bad. But, whether consecrated or misdirected, it must not be forgotten that talent, genius, dexterity, are gifts of God, and that all their products, so far as these are innocent or useful, are results of an original inspiration.
It is true that his Creator has not made each individual man an instinctive constructor of railways and palaces, as he has made each beaver a constitutional dyke-builder and each mole a constitutional tunnel-borer. But he has endowed the human race with faculties and tendencies, which, under favoring circumstances, shall eventually develop in railways and palaces as surely as beaver mind has all along developed in dykes, and mole mind worked in tunnels. And just as in carrying out His own great scheme with our species, the Most High has conveyed great moral truths through all sorts of messengers—through a Balaam and a Caiaphas as well as a Daniel and a John;—so, in carrying out His merciful plan, and gradually augmenting our sum of material comfort, the Father of earth’s families has conveyed His gifts through very various channels, sometimes sending into our world a great discovery through a scoffing philosopher, and sometimes through a Christian sage. Be the craftsman what he may; when once we have separated the moral from the mechanical—the sin which is man’s from the skill which is Jehovah’s—in every exquisite product, and more especially in every contribution to human comfort, we ought to recognize as their ultimate origin the wisdom and goodness of God. The arts themselves are His gift; the abuse alone is human. And just as an enlightened Christian looks forth on the landscape, and in its fair features as well as its countless inhabitants beholds mementoes of his Master; so, surveying a beautiful city, its museums and its monuments, its statues and fountains, or sauntering through a gallery of art or useful inventions—in all the symmetry of proportion and splendor of coloring, in every ingenious device and every powerful engine, he may read manifestations of that mind which is “wonderful in counsel and excellent in working;” and, so far as skill and adaptation and elegance are involved, piety will hail the Great Architect himself as the Maker of the Town.
Reason may be regarded as the Instinct of the human race. Like instinct, commonly so called, it has an irresistible tendency toward certain results; and when circumstances favor, these results evolve. But reason is a slow and experimental instinct. It is long before it attains to any optimism. The inferior races are only repeating masterpieces which their ancestor produced in the year of the world One. Man is constantly improving on his models, and there are many inventions on which he has only hit in this 59th century of his existence. Nevertheless, as the oak is in the acorn, so these inventions have from the first been in the instinct of humanity. That is, if you say that its nest was in the mind of the bird, or its cocoon in the mind of the silk-worm as it came from the hand of its Maker, and if you consequently deem it true and devout to recognize in these humble fabrics a trace of the wisdom which moulds the universe; so we say that the Barberini Vase and the Britannia Bridge existed in the mind of our species when first ushered into this earthly abode, and now in the providential progress of events these germs have developed in structures of beauty or grandeur, whilst admiring the human workmanship, it is right and it is comely to adore the original Authorship.