But we need not go back to the seventh century. There has been a modern apostasy, and we see right before our eyes the process of deterioration, of falling into barbarism, going on among those who have apostatized from Christianity. The author regards as an evidence of the lowest barbarism what he calls "communal marriage," that is, marriage in which the wife is common to all the males of her husband's family. We do not believe this sort of marriage was ever anything more than an exceptional fact, like polyandry; but suppose it was even common among the lowest savage tribes, how much lower or more barbarous is the state it indicates, than what the highly civilized Plato makes the magistrates prescribe in his imaginary Republic? How much in advance of such a practice is the free love advocated by Mary Wolstonecraft and Fanny Wright; the recommendation of Godwin to abolish marriage and the monopoly by one man of any one woman; than the denunciation of marriage by the late Robert Owen as one of the trinity of evils which have hitherto afflicted the race, and his proposal to replace it by a community of wives, as he proposed to replace private property by a community of goods; or, indeed, than we see actually adopted in practice by the Oneida Community? Sir John regards the gynocracy which prevails in some savage tribes as characteristic of a very low form of barbarism; but to what else tends the woman's-rights movement in his country and ours? If successful, not only would women be the rulers, but children would follow the mother's line, not the father's, for the obvious reason that, while the mother can be known, the father cannot be with any certainty. Does not free love, the mainspring of the movement, lead to this? And are not they who support it counted the advanced party of the age, and we who resist denounced as old fogies or as the defenders of man's tyranny?
Sir John relates that some tribes are so low in their intelligence that they have no or only the vaguest conceptions of the divinity, and none at all of God as creator. He need not go amongst outlying barbarians to find persons whose intelligence is equally low. He will search in vain through all Gentile philosophy without finding the conception of a creative God. Nay, among our own contemporaries he can find more who consider it a proof of their superior intelligence and rare scientific attainments that they reject the fact of creation, relegate God into the unknown and the unknowable, and teach us that the universe is self-evolved, and man is only a monkey or gorilla developed.[129] These men regard themselves as the lights of their age, and are so regarded, too, by no inconsiderable portion of the public. Need we name Auguste Comte and Sir William Hamilton, among the dead; E. Littré, Herbert Spencer, J. Stuart Mill, Professor Huxley, Charles Darwin, not to say Sir John himself, among the living? If these men and their adherents have not lapsed into barbarism, their science, if accepted, would lead us to the ideas and practices which Sir John tells us belong to the lowest stage of barbarism. Sir John doubts if any savage tribe can be found that is absolutely destitute of all religious conceptions or sentiments, but, if we may believe their own statements, we have people enough among the apostate Christians of our day who have none, and glory in it as a proof of their superiority to the rest of mankind.
Sir John sees a characteristic of barbarism or of the early savage state in the belief in and the dread of evil spirits, or what he calls demonism. The Bible tells us all the gods of the heathens are devils or demons. Even this characteristic of barbarism is reproduced in our civilized communities by spiritism, which is of enlightened American origin. This spiritism, which is rapidly becoming a religion with large numbers of men and women in our midst, is nothing but demonism, the necromancy and witchcraft or familiar spirits of the ancient world. Men who reject Christianity, who have no belief in God, or at least do not hold it necessary to worship or pay him the least homage or respect, believe in the spirits, go to the medium, and consult her, as Saul in his desperation consulted the Witch of Endor. If we go back a few years to the last century, we shall find the most polished people on the globe abolishing religion, decreeing that death is an eternal sleep, and perpetrating, in the name of liberty, virtue, humanity, and brotherly love, crimes and cruelties unsurpassed if not unequalled in the history of the most savage tribes; and we see little improvement in our own century, more thoroughly filled with the horrors of unprincipled and needless wars than any other century of which we possess the history. Indeed, the scenes of 1792-3-4 are now in process of reproduction in Europe.
We must remember that all these deteriorations have taken place in or are taking place in the most highly civilized nations of the globe, whose ancestors were Christians, and with persons many of whom were brought up in the belief of Christianity. Take the men and women who hold, on marriage and on religion, what are called "advanced views"—free-lovers and free-religionists—remove them from the restraints of the church and of the state, not yet up to their standard, and let them form a community by themselves in which their views shall be carried out in practice; would they not in two or three generations lapse into a state not above that of the most degraded and filthy savages? We see this deterioration going on in our midst and right before our eyes, as the effect of apostasy from our holy religion. This proves that apostasy is sufficient to explain the existence of the savage races, without supposing the human race began in "utter barbarism." If apostasy in modern times, as we see it does, leads to "utter barbarism," why should it not have done so in ancient times?
We might make the case still stronger against the author's hypothesis, if necessary, by referring to the great and renowned nations of antiquity, that in turn led the civilization of the world. Of the nations that apostatized or adhered to the great Gentile apostasy, not one has survived the lapse of time. To every one of them has succeeded barbarism, desolation, or a new people. The Egypt of antiquity fell before the Persian conqueror, and the Egypt of the Greeks was absorbed by Rome, and fell with her. Assyria leaves of her greatness only long since buried and forgotten ruins, while the savage Kurd and the predatory Arab roam at will over the desert that has succeeded to her once flourishing cities and richly cultivated fields. Syria, Tyre, Carthage, and the Greek cities of Europe and Asia have disappeared or dwindled into insignificance, and what remains of them they owe to the conservative power of the Christianity they adopted and have in some measure retained. So true is it, as the Psalmist says, "the wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the nations that forget God." How explain this fact, if these ancient nations could by their own inherent energy and power of self-development raise themselves from "utter barbarism" to the civilization they once possessed, that they could not preserve it; that, after having reached a certain point, they began to decline, grew corrupt, and at length fell by their own internal rottenness? If men and nations are naturally progressive, how happens it that we find so many individuals and nations decline and fall, through internal corruption?
Another fact is not less conclusive against Sir John's hypothesis, that in all the nations of the heathen world their least barbarous period known to us is their earliest after the apostasy and dispersion. The oldest of the sacred books of the Hindus are the profoundest and richest in thought, and the freest from superstition and puerilities so characteristic of the Hindu people to-day. The earliest religion of the Romans was far more spiritual, intellectual, than that which prevailed at the establishment of the empire and the introduction of Christianity. Indeed, wherever we have the means of tracing the religious history of the ancient heathen nations, we find it is a history of almost uninterrupted deterioration and corruption, becoming continually more cruel, impure, and debasing as time flows on. The mysteries, perhaps, retained something of the earlier doctrines, but they did little to arrest the downward tendency of the national religion; the philosophers, no doubt, retained some valuable traditions of the primitive religion, but so mixed up with gross error and absurd fables that they had no effect on the life or morals of the people. One of the last acts of Socrates was to require Crito to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius. If Sir John's hypothesis were true, nothing of this could happen, and we should find the religion of every nation, as time goes on, becoming purer and more refined, less gross and puerile, more enlightened and intellectual, and more spiritual and elevating in its influence.
The traditions of some, perhaps of all heathen nations, refer their origin to savage and barbarian ancestors, and this may have been the fact with many of them. Horace would seem to go the full length of Sir John's theory. He tells us that the primitive men sprang like animals from the earth, a mute and filthy herd, fighting one another for an acorn or a den. Cicero speaks somewhat to the same purpose, only he does not say it was the state of the primeval man. Yet the traditions of the heathen nations do not in general favor the main point of Sir John's hypothesis, that men came out of barbarism by their own spontaneous development, natural progressiveness, or indigenous and unaided efforts. They rise, according to these traditions, to the civilized state only by the assistance of the gods, or by the aid of missionaries or colonies from nations already civilized. The goddess Ceres teaches them to plant corn and make bread; Bacchus teaches them to plant the vine and to make wine; Prometheus draws fire from heaven and teaches them its use; other divinities teach to keep bees, to tame and rear flocks and herds, and the several arts of peace and war. Athens attributed her civilization to Minerva and to Cecrops and his Egyptian colony; Thebes, hers to Orpheus and Cadmus, of Phœnician origin; Rome claimed to descend from a Trojan colony, and borrowed her laws from the Athenians—her literature, philosophy, her art and science, from the Greeks. The poets paint the primitive age as the age of gold, and the philosophers always speak of the race as deteriorating, and find the past superior to the present. What is best and truest in Plato he ascribes to the wisdom of the ancients, and even Homer speaks of the degeneracy of men in his days from what they were at the siege of Troy. We think the author will search in vain through all antiquity to find a tradition or a hint which assigns the civilization of any people to its own indigenous and unassisted efforts.
Sir John Lubbock describes the savages as incurious and little given to reflection. He says they never look beyond the phenomenon to its cause. They see the world in which they are placed, and never think of looking further, and asking who made it, or whence they themselves came or whither they go. They lack not only curiosity, but the power of abstraction and generalization, and even thought is a burden to them. This is no doubt in the main true; but it makes against their natural progressiveness, and explains why they are not, as we know they are not, progressive, but remain always stationary, if left to themselves. The chief characteristic of the savage state is in fact its immobility. The savage gyrates from age to age in the same narrow circle—never of himself advances beyond it. Whether a tribe sunk in what Sir John calls "utter barbarism," and which he holds was the original state of the human race, has ever been or ever can be elevated to a civilized state by any human efforts, even of others already civilized, is, perhaps, problematical. As far as experience goes, the tendency of such a tribe, brought in contact with a civilized race, is to retire the deeper into the forest, to waste away, and finally to become extinct. Certain it is, no instance of its becoming a civilized people can be named.
In every known instance in which a savage or barbarous people has become civilized, it has been by the aid or influence of religion, or their relations with a people already civilized. The barbarians that overthrew the Roman Empire of the West, and seated themselves on its ruins, were more than half Romanized before the conquest by their relations with the Romans and service in the armies of the empire, and they rather continued the Roman order of civilization in the several kingdoms and states they founded than destroyed it. The Roman system of education, and even the imperial schools, if fewer in number and on a reduced scale, were continued all through the barbarous ages down to the founding of the universities of mediæval Europe. Their civilization was carried forward, far in advance of that of Greece or Rome, by the church, the great civilizer of the nations. The northern barbarians that remained at home, the Germans, the Scandinavians, the Sclaves, were civilized by the labors of Christian monks and missionaries from Rome and Constantinople, from Gaul, England, and Ireland. In no instance has their civilization been of indigenous origin and development.
Sir John Lubbock replies to this as he does to Archbishop Whately's assertion that no instance is on record of a savage people having risen to a civilized state by its own indigenous and unassisted efforts, that it is no objection, because we should not expect to find any record of any such an event, since it took place, if at all, before the invention of letters, and in "prehistoric times." We grant that the fact that there is no written record of it is not conclusive proof that no instance of the kind ever occurred; but if so important an event ever occurred, we should expect some trace of it in the traditions of civilized nations, or at least find some tendencies to it in the outlying savage nations of the present, from which it might be inferred as a thing not improbable in itself. But nothing of the sort is found. The author's appeal to our ignorance, and our ignorance, cannot serve his purpose. He arraigns the universal faith of Christendom, and he must make out his case by positive, not simply negative proofs. Till his hypothesis is proved by positive evidence, the faith of Christendom remains firm, and nothing can be concluded against it.