The design of the Creator of universal brotherhood amongst his creatures was not to be fulfilled before the lapse of ages, and throughout that dismal period it has the appearance of being perpetually thwarted by their perverseness. The memories of Paradise rapidly faded away amongst them. After what period of time we are not told, the sons of God committed a second infidelity by intermarrying with the daughters of men. The result was a race of giants—giants in capacity and crime as well as in bodily form—whose existence universal tradition attests. In almost open alliance with the powers of darkness, they sank with such fearful rapidity down the abyss of depravation, dragging with them the better portion of the race, that, to avert the triumph of hell and the utter reprobation of his creature, the offended Creator buried the guilty memories of colossal crime beneath an universal deluge, at whose subsidence the first civilization reappeared on the mountains of Asia in all its earliest purity, brought across the forty days’ extinction of life upon the earth by the eight souls who alone had turned a deaf ear to the universal seduction. “This idea of a gradual and deeper degradation of human kind,” says Frederick Schlegel, “in each succeeding age, appears at first sight not to accord very well with the testimony which sacred tradition furnishes on man’s primitive state, for it represents the two races of the primitive world as contemporary; and, indeed, Seth, the progenitor of the better and nobler race of virtuous patriarchs, was much younger than Cain. However, this contradiction is only apparent, if we reflect that it was the wicked and violent race which drew the other into its disorders, and that it was from this contamination a giant corruption sprang, which continually increased, till, with a trifling exception, it pervaded the whole mass of mankind, and till the justice of God required the extirpation of degenerate humanity by one universal flood.”
It does not admit of a moment’s doubt, as our author argues, that with this terrible judgment began the dissolution of that fraternal unity which God had intended should be the happy lot of the human family, and for which the configuration of the earth was adapted. The gigantic unity of crime was smitten to pieces in the helplessness of division. They who had been brothers looked in one another’s faces and found them strange. They opened their lips, and, lo! their speech was to others a jargon of unintelligible sounds. The one could no more understand the other than they could the wolf or the jackal with whom they both began to be mutually classed. The intercommunion of families of men with one another was rudely snapped asunder. There were no means of common action, there was no medium of common thought. The fragments into which the human family were smitten went off in different directions, to post themselves, in attitudes of mutual distrust and defiance, behind mountains or morasses, on the skirts of forests, the borders of torrents, or in the security of measureless deserts, where their practised eyes swept the horizon. Intercommunion was rendered still more impossible by the mutual antagonism, fear, and hatred that prevailed. And the very ocean, instead of being a pathway for the interchange of social life, became a formidable barrier between man and man. The dangers to be encountered on the lands to which the winds might bear them were more to be dreaded than the terrible phantoms which, issuing ever and anon from the home of the storms, raged across the ocean, and lashed into merciless fury its roaring waves. Memory had lost, in the primeval language, the key of its treasure-house. As years went on, amidst the exacting preoccupations of new ways of life, new surroundings, new ways of expressing their thoughts, and their increasing tribal or race isolation, the ideas upon which their primeval civilization had been based grew dimmer and dimmer, until they finally disappeared.
“To establish this in detail,” says the author of Gentilism, “is the purpose of this work.” And this purpose appears to us to have been accomplished in the most convincing manner.
The scientists maintain, and it is necessary to their evolution theory, that man began with barbarism, and moved slowly onwards in the gradual stages of their tedious evolution process towards what they call civilization, which is to lead, we believe, in the future developments of the ever-continuing evolution, to some loftier state and condition, of the nature of which they supply us with not the faintest idea.
This notion of the original barbarism of man is one of those fallacies which get imbedded in the general belief of mankind one knows not how. Strange to say, it has been very generally acquiesced in for no manner of reason; and it is only of late years that thoughtful men, outside of the faith, have come to suspect that it is not quite the truism they had imagined.
There is a reason for this: The attenuation of the claims of another world on the every-day life and on the conduct of men effected by the great revolt of the XVIth century, and the keener relish for the things of this life which consequently ensued, have infected the sentiments of mankind with an exaggerated sense of the importance of material objects and pursuits. Thus the idea of civilization, instead of being that of the highest development of the moral and whole inner being of social man, is limited to the discovery of all the unnumbered ways and means of administering to the embellishment and luxury of his actual life. His very mental progress, as they term it with extraordinary incorrectness, is only regarded in this light.
“The speculators on the stone, bronze, and iron ages,” writes our author, “place civilization almost exclusively in the enjoyment by man of a multitude of little inventions of his own, many of which certainly are derived from the knowledge and use of metals. Any nation deprived of them cannot be called civilized in their opinion, because reduced to a very simple state of life, which, they say unhesitatingly, is barbarism.… Barbarism, in fact, depends much more on moral degradation than on physical want of comfort. And when we come to describe patriarchal society, our readers will understand how a tribe or nation may deserve to be placed on an exalted round of the social ladder, although living exclusively on the fruits of the earth, and cultivating it with a simple wooden plough.”[237]
Father Thébaud next proceeds, with convincing force, to demolish the argument in behalf of the gradual evolution of the entire race from a state of barbarism, which the evolutionists allege to have been inevitably its first stage of intellectual consciousness drawn from the discovery of human skeletons in caves, and in the drift of long past ages, in juxtaposition with instruments of rude construction belonging to the palæolithic age and fossil remains of extinct animals. This argument has always appeared to us so feeble as to seem a mystery how it could be employed by learned men, unless in support of some preconceived opinion which they would maintain at all hazards. The occasional outbreaks of the Mississippi, the terrible devastation effected by the mere overflow of the Garonne in the South of France, give but a faint idea of what changes must have been effected upon the crust of the earth by the subsidence of the huge mass of water, which must have been at least eight or nine times as ponderous as all the oceans which have since lain at peace in its hollows. As the prodigious volumes of water, sucked and drawn hither and thither, as they hurried to their mountain-bed, rushed in furious tides and vast whirlpools of terrific force, they must have torn up the earth’s crust like a rotten rag. Whole valleys must have been scooped out down to the very root of the mountains, and débris of all kinds deposited everywhere in all kinds of confusion, so as to afford no secure data whatever for chronological, or zoölogical, or geological deductions.
Still more conclusive is Father Thébaud’s refutation of the argument in behalf of the evolution theory drawn from the discovery of stone implements of rude construction in what is asserted to be the earliest drift deposit of iron in the later strata, and bronze in the latest. To make this argument of any force it must be proved that these periods evolved regularly and invariably from one another throughout the whole race of mankind. Their periodicity, as Father Thébaud has it, must be indisputably proved. But this is just what it cannot be. On the contrary,
“In this last age in which we live; in the previous ages, which we can know by clear and unobjectionable history; finally, in the dimmest ages of antiquity of which we possess any sufficiently reliable records, the three ‘periods’ of stone, bronze, and iron have always subsisted simultaneously, and consequently are no more ‘periods’ when we speak of the aggregate of mankind, but they are only three co-existing aspects of the same specific individual.”[238]