The second proposition, that civilized nations retain traces of barbarism, proves nothing to the purpose. These traces, at most, prove only that the nations in which we detect them have passed through a state of barbarism, as we know modern nations have; not that barbarism was, in any form, the primitive condition of the race. It is not pretended that no savage tribe has ever been civilized; what is denied is, that the race began in the savage state, or that, if it had so begun, it could ever have risen by its own natural forces alone to civilization. There is no evidence that the cruel and bloody customs, traces of which we find in civilized nations, were those of the primeval man. The polished and cultivated Romans were more savage in their customs than the northern barbarians who overthrew their civilization, much to the relief of mankind. When the late Theodore Parker drew a picture of the New Zealander in order to describe Adam, he proceeded according to his theory of progress, but without a shadow of authority. We find a cruelty, an inhumanity, an oppression, bloody and obscene rites, among polished nations—as Rome, Syria, Phoenicia, and modern India—that we shall look in vain for among downright savages; which shows that we owe them to cultivation, to development, that is, to "development," as the noble duke well says, "in corruption."
But these traces of so-called barbarism among civilized nations are more than offset by remains of civilization which we find in savage tribes. Sir J. Lubbock and others take these remains as indications of progress among savages; but they mistake the evening twilight deepening into darkness, for that of the morning ushering in the day. This is evident from the fact that they are followed by no progress. They are reminiscences, not promises. If germs, they never germinate; but have been deprived of their vitality. To us, paganism bears witness in all its forms that it has degenerated from its normna, or type; not that it is advancing toward it. We see in its incoherence, its incongruities and inequalities, that it is a fall or departure from something higher, more living and more perfect. Any one studying Protestantism, in any of its forms, may see that it is not an original system of religion; that it is a departure from its type, not an approach to it; and, if we know well the Catholic Church, we see at once that in her is the type that Protestantism loses, corrupts, or travesties. So paganism bears unmistakable evidence of what we know from authentic history, that, whether with polished gentiles or with rude savages and barbarians, its type, from which it recedes, is the patriarchal religion. We know that it was an apostasy or falling away from that religion, the primitive religion of the race, as Protestantism is an apostasy or falling away from the Catholic Church. Protestantism, in the modern world, is what gentilism was in the ancient; and as gentilism is the religion of all savage or barbarian tribes, we have in Protestantism a key for explaining whatever is dark or obscure in their history. We see in Protestant nations a tendency to lose or throw off more and more of what they retained when they separated from the church, and which before the lapse of many generations, if not arrested, will lead them to a hopeless barbarism. The traces of Catholic faith we find in them are reminiscences, not prophecies.
We find with the lowest and most degraded savages, language, and often a language of great richness, singular beauty and expressiveness. Terms for which savages have no use may sometimes be wanting, but it is rare that the language cannot be made to supply them from its resources. In the poorest language of a savage tribe, there is always evidence of its having been the language of a people superior in ideas and culture to the present condition of those who speak it. Language, among savage tribes, we take to be always indicative of a lost state far above that of barbarism; and it not only refutes the theory of natural progress, but, as far as it goes, proves the doctrine of primitive instruction by the Creator, maintained by Dr. Whately, and only partially accepted by his Grace of Argyll.
Language is no human invention, nor the product of individual or social progress. It requires language to invent language, and there is no individual progress out of society, and no society is possible without language. Hence, animals may be gregarious, but not sociable. They do not, and never can, form society. Max Müller has disposed of the bow-wow theory, or the origin of language in the imitation of the cries of animals, and also of the theory that supposes it to originate in the imitation of the sounds of nature, as buzz, rattle, etc.; for if a few words could originate in this way, language itself could not, since there is much more in language than words. The more common theory, just now, and which has respectable names in its favor, is that God is indeed the author of language, but as causa eminens, as he is of all that nature does; that is, he does not directly teach man language, but creates him with the power or faculty of speaking, and making himself understood by articulate speech. But this theory will not bear examination.
Between language and the faculty of using it there is a difference, and no faculty creates its own object. The faculty of speaking could no more be exercised without language, than the faculty of seeing without a visible object. Where there is no language, the faculty is and must be inoperative. The error is in supposing that the faculty of using language is the faculty of creating language, which it cannot be; for, till the language is possessed and held in the mind, there is nothing for the faculty of speech to operate on or with. To have given man the faculty of speech, the Creator must have begun by teaching him language, or by infusing it with the meaning of its words into his mind. We misapprehend the very nature and office of language, if we suppose it can possibly be used except as learned from or taught by a teacher. Man, as second cause, can no more produce language than he can create something from nothing. If God made us as second causes capable of creating language, why can we not do it now, and master it without a long and painful study? Since the faculty must be the same in all men, why do not all men speak one and the same dialect?
We will suppose man had language from the first. But there is no language without discourse of reason. A parrot or a crow may be taught to pronounce single words, and even sentences, but it would be absurd to assert that either has the faculty of language. To have language and be able to use it, one must have knowledge, and the sense of the word must precede, or at least be simultaneous with the word. Both the word and its meaning must be associated in the mind. How then could the Creator give man the faculty of language, without imparting to him in some way the ideas and principles it is fitted to express, and without expressing which it cannot be language? He must do so, or there could be no verbum mentis, and the word would be spoken without meaning. Moreover, all language is profoundly philosophical, and conforms more nearly to the reality of things than any human system yet attained to, not only by savages, but by civilized and cultivated men; and whenever it deviates from that reality, it is when it has been corrupted by the false systems and methods of philosophers. In all languages, we find subject, predicate, and copula. The copula is always the verb to be, teaching those who understand it that nothing existing can be affirmed except by being and in its relation to being, that is God, who is QUI EST. Were ignorant savages able distinctly to recognize and embody in language the ideal formula, when no philosopher can ever apprehend and consider it unless represented to him in words? Impossible.
We take language, therefore, as a reminiscence among savages of a previous civilization, and a conclusive proof that, up to a certain point at least, the primeval man, as Dr. Whately maintains, was and must have been instructed by his Maker. As language is never known save as learned from a teacher, its existence among the lowest and most degraded barbarians is a proof that the primeval man was not, and could not have been an untutored savage. The Anglican archbishop, having, as the Scottish duke, no proper criterion of truth, may have included in the primitive instruction more than it actually contained. An error of this sort in an Anglican should surprise no one. Truth or sound philosophy from such a source would be the only thing to surprise us. We do not suppose Adam was directly instructed in all the mechanic arts, in the whole science and practice of agriculture, or in the entire management of flocks and herds, nor that he had steam-engines, spinning-jennies, power-looms, steamboats, railroads, locomotives, palace-cars, or even lightning telegraphs. We do not suppose that the race, in relation to the material order, received any direct instructions, except of the most elementary kind, or in matters of prime necessity, or high utility to his physical life and health. The ornamental arts, and other matters which do not exceed man's natural powers, may have been left to man to find out for himself, though we have instances recorded in which some of them were taught by direct inspiration, and many modern inventions are only the reproduction of arts once known, and subsequently lost or forgotten.
It is not difficult to explain how our modern advocates of progress have come to regard the savage as the primeval man, and not as the degenerate man. Their theory of natural progress demands it, and they have always shown great facility in accommodating their facts to their theories. They take also their starting-point in heathenism of comparatively recent origin, and study the law of human development in the history of gentilism. They forget that gentilism originated in an apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive moral and religious order, and that, from the first, there remained, and always has remained, on earth a people that did not apostatize, that remained faithful to tradition, to the primitive instruction and wisdom. They fail to consider that, language confounded and the race dispersed, those who remained nearest the original seats of civilization, and were separated by the least distance from the people that remained faithful, became the earliest civilized or polished gentile nations, and that those who wandered further into the wilderness—receding further and further from light, losing more and more of their original patrimony, cut off from all intercourse with civilization by distance, by difference of language, and to some extent, perhaps, by physical changes and convulsions of the globe, degenerated gradually into barbarians and savages. Occasionally, in the course of ages, some of these wandering and degenerate tribes were brought under the influence of civilization by the arts, the arms, and the religion of the more civilized gentile nations. But in none has the gentile civilization, in the proper sense of the term, ever risen above what the gentiles took with them from the primitive stock, when they apostatized. Protestant nations are below, not above, what they were at the epoch of the Reformation. The reformers were greatly superior to any of their successors.
But our philosophic historians take no account of these things, nor of the fact that history shows them no barbaric ancestors of the Egyptians, Indians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Syrians, Phoenicians, etc. They find, or think they find, from the Greek poets and traditions, that the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans, each a comparatively modern people, were really savages, and that suffices them to prove that the savage state is the primeval state of the race! They find, also, that a marvellous progress in civilization, under Christianity has been effected, and what hinders them from concluding that man is naturally progressive, or that the savage is able, by his own efforts, to lift himself into civilized life? Have not the northern barbarians, who overthrew the Roman empire of the west, and seated themselves on its majestic ruins, become, under the teachings and the supernatural influences of the church, the great civilized nations of the modern world? How, then, pretend to deny that barbarians and savages can become civilized by their own spontaneous efforts and natural forces alone?