Which day by day were fashioned,
When as yet there was none of them.’[38]
By what link man is united physically to the great series below him, by what line and in what specific manner he arose, it has not yet been given to science to determine. Biological science sees, with inevitable certainty, that he must have been in vital union with that series; that physically he is a part of the majestic organic whole, from the first dawn of life upon the globe until now.
At the same time it is equally certain that other agencies which could not have acted on ape or other mammal, nor indeed on any other living form besides, came into operation, when man, as such, became an inhabitant of this earth.
Nor is it by any means other than conceivable that science, which has transformed the face of the world in fifty years, may be able to demonstrate the actual physical line of man’s origin. But if that be so, if the line along which man’s physical nature was moulded of the dust of the ground, by the Creative Mind and will, were made so plain that none could refuse the evidence, it may leave undisturbed our mental peace, and unaltered our conviction of the dignity and majesty of man. It would leave our responsibilities undiminished, our rights uninfringed, and our hopes unclouded.
The saint is none the less saintly, because he is ancestrally the last, and prevised outcome, of an inconceivably grand progression of creative laws, operating through countless cycles, than he would have been, as the descendant of a man produced by an isolated act of creation. The song of the nightingale is no iota less rich in fluent melody because its larynx was modified from less melodious forms; and the martyrdom of Paul, or the noble sacrifices of heroes and reformers to secure the sacred rights of liberty and truth for their fellow-men, are none the less exalted because we must trace their ancestry to the slow operation of creative laws, which in the great unbroken stream of life upon the earth gave origin to the monod, the coral-polyp, the mollusc, the lizard, the aye-aye, and the chimpanzee. Verily, if the researches of science demonstrate that this was the method of creative action, we may not murmur.
The sovereignty of man does not depend on a particular view of the exact manner in which the Creator caused the elements of the earth to produce his frame. ‘And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground;’ it is not how He so formed him. None has power to affirm or to deny how, unless with reverent hands he find it written in the rocks, or woven indelibly with the very structure of man himself. It is because men have interpreted, without evidence, the stages of creative action, and welded these non-essentials with iron girdles of dogma, that faith has again and again been imperilled.
The true crown of manhood, the final majesty and exalted mystery of creative power, was not man’s body, but his soul. ‘And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul,’ is the expression of that which gives his unshared dignity to man.
What is meant by this, who shall explain? Who can peer into the depths of a mystery so profound? It defies all our powers of search; dare we make a special interpretation or understanding of how this was brought about, an essential of belief? Is it not enough that it was the supreme, as it was, so far as our present knowledge will carry us, the final outcome of creation?
When the Creative Power and wisdom had built man’s physical nature of the dust of the ground, whether suddenly or slowly, by this method or by that, He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a living soul. It was the possession of what we call the soul that gave to the manhood its being. How this was imparted, who can know? who shall explain? Even if the very method be at last discovered, or approximated, the unalterable question must remain, why the method, the law, brought about so sublime a result, and from whence came the conditions that made the laws direct themselves to such an exalted end. In fine, how physical laws could so be caused to act as to give origin to consciousness, thought, and moral faculties. Plainly, this ‘end’ must have lain in the Divine ‘beginning;’ and we must go behind and below the mechanics of phenomena and explain their vera causa; we must find our way above matter not-living in the great past, and fathom the very essence of the cause that made it live, before we can attempt to explain the origin of that self in man which looks upon and knows itself. We have seen that matter and force will not, as sole factors, lend themselves to a philosophy of the origin and explanation of this. A linear arrangement of the ascending mentality of brutes does not really explain, or even minimize, the difficulties of the problem. It simply makes the area of the problem the wider.