1.10. THE "FALL OF MAN" AND
HISTORY.
THE history of art, especially as shown by architecture, in the
noblest monuments of the most enlightened nations of antiquity;
gives abundant proofs of the upward tendency of man from the
rudest and simplest beginnings. Many columns of early Egyptian
temples or tombs are but bundles of Nile reeds slightly
conventionalized in stone; the temples of Greece, including not
only the earliest forms, but the Parthenon itself, while in
parts showing an evolution out of Egyptian and Assyrian
architecture, exhibit frequent reminiscences and even imitations
of earlier constructions in wood; the medieval cathedrals, while
evolved out of Roman and Byzantine structures, constantly show
unmistakable survivals of prehistoric construction.
So, too, general history has come in, illustrating the unknown
from the known: the development of man in the prehistoric period
from his development within historic times. Nothing is more
evident from history than the fact that weaker bodies of men
driven out by stronger do not necessarily relapse into
barbarism, but frequently rise, even under the most unfavourable
circumstances, to a civilization equal or superior to that from
which they have been banished. Out of very many examples showing
this law of upward development, a few may be taken as typical.
The Slavs, who sank so low under the pressure of stronger races
that they gave the modern world a new word to express the most
hopeless servitude, have developed powerful civilizations
peculiar to themselves; the, barbarian tribes who ages ago took
refuge amid the sand-banks and morasses of Holland, have
developed one of the world's leading centres of civilization;
the wretched peasants who about the fifth century took refuge
from invading hordes among the lagoons and mud banks of Venetia,
developed a power in art, arms, and politics which is among the
wonders of human history; the Puritans, driven from the
civilization of Great Britain to the unfavourable climate, soil,
and circumstances of early New England,—the Huguenots, driven
from France, a country admirably fitted for the highest growth
of civilization, to various countries far less fitted for such
growth,—the Irish peasantry, driven in vast numbers from their
own island to other parts of the world on the whole less fitted
to them—all are proofs that, as a rule, bodies of men once
enlightened, when driven to unfavourable climates and brought
under the most depressing circumstances, not only retain what
enlightenment they have, but go on increasing it. Besides these,
we have such cases as those of criminals banished to various
penal colonies, from whose descendants has been developed a
better morality; and of pirates, like those of the Bounty,
whose descendants, in a remote Pacific island, became sober,
steady citizens. Thousands of examples show the prevalence of
this same rule—that men in masses do not forget the main gains
of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations,
their tendency is upward.
Another class of historic facts also testifies in the most
striking manner to this same upward tendency: the decline and
destruction of various civilizations brilliant but hopelessly
vitiated. These catastrophes are seen more and more to be but
steps in, this development. The crumbling away of the great
ancient civilizations based upon despotism, whether the
despotism of monarch, priest, or mob—the decline and fall of
Roman civilization, for example, which, in his most remarkable
generalization, Guizot has shown to have been necessary to the
development of the richer civilization of modern Europe; the
terrible struggle and loss of the Crusades, which once appeared
to be a mere catastrophe, but are now seen to have brought in,
with the downfall of feudalism, the beginnings of the
centralizing, civilizing monarchical period; the French
Revolution, once thought a mere outburst of diabolic passion,
but now seen to be an unduly delayed transition from the
monarchical to the constitutional epoch: all show that even
widespread deterioration and decline—often, indeed, the
greatest political and moral catastrophes—so far from leading
to a fall of mankind, tend in the long run to raise humanity to
higher planes.
Thus, then, Anthropology and its handmaids, Ethnology,
Philology, and History, have wrought out, beyond a doubt, proofs
of the upward evolution of humanity since the appearance of man
upon our planet.
Nor have these researches been confined to progress in man's
material condition. Far more important evidences have been found
of upward evolution in his family, social, moral, intellectual,
and religious relations. The light thrown on this subject by
such men as Lubbock, Tylor, Herbert Spencer, Buckle, Draper, Max
Muller, and a multitude of others, despite mistakes, haltings,
stumblings, and occasional following of delusive paths, is among
the greatest glories of the century now ending. From all these
investigators in their various fields, holding no brief for any
system sacred or secular, but seeking truth as truth, comes the
same general testimony of the evolution of higher out of lower.
The process has been indeed slow and painful, but this does not
prove that it may not become more rapid and less fruitful in
sorrow as humanity goes on.
While, then, it is not denied that many instances of
retrogression can be found, the consenting voice of unbiased
investigators in all lands has declared more and more that the
beginnings of our race must have been low and brutal, and that
the tendency has been upward. To combat this conclusion by
examples of decline and deterioration here and there has become
impossible: as well try to prove that, because in the
Mississippi there are eddies in which the currents flow
northward, there is no main stream flowing southward; or that,
because trees decay and fall, there is no law of upward growth
from germ to trunk, branches, foliage, and fruit.
A very striking evidence that the theological theory had become
untenable was seen when its main supporter in the scientific
field, Von Martius, in the full ripeness of his powers, publicly
declared his conversion to the scientific view.
Yet, while the tendency of enlightened human thought in recent
times is unmistakable, the struggle against the older view is
not yet ended. The bitterness of the Abbe Hamard in France has
been carried to similar and even greater extremes among sundry
Protestant bodies in Europe and America. The simple truth of
history mates it a necessity, unpleasant though it be, to
chronicle two typical examples in the United States.
In the year 1875 a leader in American industrial enterprise
endowed at the capital of a Southern State a university which
bore his name. It was given into the hands of one of the
religious sects most powerful in that region, and a bishop of
that sect became its president. To its chair of Geology was
called Alexander Winchell, a scholar who had already won
eminence as a teacher and writer in that field, a professor
greatly beloved and respected in the two universities with which
he had been connected, and a member of the sect which the
institution of learning above referred to represented.
But his relations to this Southern institution were destined to
be brief. That his lectures at the Vanderbilt University were
learned, attractive, and stimulating, even his enemies were
forced to admit; but he was soon found to believe that there had
been men earlier than the period as signed to Adam, and even
that all the human race are not descended from Adam. His desire
was to reconcile science and Scripture, and he was now treated
by a Methodist Episcopal Bishop in Tennessee just as, two
centuries before, La Peyrere had been treated, for a similar
effort, by a Roman Catholic vicar-general in Belgium. The
publication of a series of articles on the subject,
contributed by the professor to a Northern religious newspaper
at its own request, brought matters to a climax; for, the
articles having fallen under the notice of a leading
Southwestern organ of the denomination controlling the Vanderbilt
University, the result was a most bitter denunciation of
Prof. Winchell and of his views. Shortly afterward the
professor was told by Bishop McTyeire that "our people are of
the opinion that such views are contrary to the plan of
redemption," and was requested by the bishop to quietly resign
his chair, To this the professor made the fitting reply: "If
the board of trustees have the manliness to dismiss me for cause,
and declare the cause, I prefer that they should do it. No power
on earth could persuade me to resign."
"We do not propose," said the bishop, with quite gratuitous
suggestiveness, "to treat you as the Inquisition treated Galileo."
"But what you propose is the same thing," rejoined Dr. Winchell.
"It is ecclesiastical proscription for an opinion which must be
settled by scientific evidence."
Twenty-four hours later Dr. Winchell was informed that his chair
had been abolished, and its duties, with its salary, added to
those of a colleague; the public were given to understand that
the reasons were purely economic; the banished scholar was
heaped with official compliments, evidently in hope that he would
keep silence.
Such was not Dr. Winchell's view. In a frank letter to the
leading journal of the university town he stated the whole
matter. The intolerance-hating press of the country, religious
and secular, did not hold its peace. In vain the authorities of
the university waited for the storm to blow over. It was evident,
at last, that a defence must be made, and a local organ of the
sect, which under the editorship of a fellow-professor had always
treated Dr. Winchell's views with the luminous inaccuracy which
usually characterizes a professor's ideas of a rival's teachings,
assumed the task. In the articles which followed, the usual
scientific hypotheses as to the creation were declared to be
"absurd," "vague and unintelligible," "preposterous and
gratuitous." This new champion stated that "the objections drawn
from the fossiliferous strata and the like are met by reference
to the analogy of Adam and Eve, who presented the phenomena of
adults when they were but a day old, and by the Flood of Noah and
other cataclysms, which, with the constant change of Nature, are
sufficient to account for the phenomena in question"!
Under inspiration of this sort the Tennessee Conference of the
religious body in control of the university had already, in
October, 1878, given utterance to its opinion of unsanctified
science as follows: "This is an age in which scientific atheism,
having divested itself of the habiliments that most adorn and
dignify humanity, walks abroad in shameless denudation. The
arrogant and impertinent claims of this `science, falsely so
called,' have been so boisterous and persistent, that the
unthinking mass have been sadly deluded; but our university
alone has had the courage to lay its young but vigorous hand upon
the mane of untamed Speculation and say, `We will have no more
of this.'" It is a consolation to know how the result, thus
devoutly sought, has been achieved; for in the "ode" sung at
the laying of the corner-stone of a new theological building of
the same university, in May, 1880, we read:
"Science and Revelation here
In perfect harmony appear,
Guiding young feet along the road
Through grace and Nature up to God."
It is also pleasing to know that, while an institution calling
itself a university thus violated the fundamental principles on
which any institution worthy of the name must be based, another
institution which has the glory of being the first in the entire
North to begin something like a university organization—the
State University of Michigan—recalled Dr. Winchell at once to
his former professorship, and honoured itself by maintaining him
in that position, where, unhampered, he was thereafter able to
utter his views in the midst of the largest body of students on
the American Continent.
Disgraceful as this history was to the men who drove out
Dr. Winchell, they but succeeded, as various similar bodies of
men making similar efforts have done, in advancing their supposed
victim to higher position and more commanding influence.
A few years after this suppression of earnest Christian thought
at an institution of learning in the western part of our
Southern States, there appeared a similar attempt in sundry
seaboard States of the South.
As far back as the year 1857 the Presbyterian Synod of
Mississippi passed the following resolution:
"Whereas, We live in an age in which the most insidious attacks
are made on revealed religion through the natural sciences, and
as it behooves the Church at all times to have men capable of
defending the faith once delivered to the saints;
"Resolved, That this presbytery recommend the endowment of a
professorship of Natural Science as connected with revealed
religion in one or more of our theological seminaries."
Pursuant to this resolution such a chair was established in the
theological seminary at Columbia, S. C., and James Woodrow was
appointed professor. Dr. Woodrow seems to have been admirably
fitted for the position—a devoted Christian man, accepting the
Presbyterian standards of faith in which he had been brought up,
and at the same time giving every effort to acquaint himself
with the methods and conclusions of science. To great natural
endowments he added constant labours to arrive at the truth in
this field. Visiting Europe, he made the acquaintance of many of
the foremost scientific investigators, became a student in
university lecture rooms and laboratories, an interested hearer
in scientific conventions, and a correspondent of leading men of
science at home and abroad. As a result, he came to the
conclusion that the hypothesis of evolution is the only one
which explains various leading facts in natural science. This he
taught, and he also taught that such a view is not incompatible
with a true view of the sacred Scriptures.
In 1882 and 1883 the board of directors of the theological
seminary, in fear that "scepticism in the world is using alleged
discoveries in science to impugn the Word of God," requested
Prof. Woodrow to state his views in regard to evolution. The
professor complied with this request in a very powerful address,
which was published and widely circulated, to such effect that
the board of directors shortly afterward passed resolutions
declaring the theory of evolution as defined by Prof. Woodrow
not inconsistent with perfect soundness in the faith.
In the year 1884 alarm regarding Dr. Woodrow's teachings began
to show itself in larger proportions, and a minority report was
introduced into the Synod of South Carolina declaring that "the
synod is called upon to decide not upon the question whether the
said views of Dr. Woodrow contradict the Bible in its highest
and absolute sense, but upon the question whether they
contradict the interpretation of the Bible by the Presbyterian
Church in the United States."
Perhaps a more self-condemnatory statement was never presented,
for it clearly recognized, as a basis for intolerance, at least
a possible difference between "the interpretation of the Bible
by the Presbyterian Church" and the teachings of "the Bible in
its highest and absolute sense."
This hostile movement became so strong that, in spite of the
favourable action of the directors of the seminary, and against
the efforts of a broad-minded minority in the representative
bodies having ultimate charge of the institution, the delegates
from the various synods raised a storm of orthodoxy and drove
Dr. Woodrow from his post. Happily, he was at the same time
professor in the University of South Carolina in the same city
of Columbia, and from his chair in that institution he continued
to teach natural science with the approval of the great majority
of thinking men in that region; hence, the only effect of the
attempt to crush him was, that his position was made higher,
respect for him deeper, and his reputation wider.
In spite of attempts by the more orthodox to prevent students of
the theological seminary from attending his lectures at the
university, they persisted in hearing him; indeed, the
reputation of heresy seemed to enhance his influence.
It should be borne in mind that the professor thus treated had
been one of the most respected and beloved university
instructors in the South during more than a quarter of a
century, and that he was turned out of his position with no
opportunity for careful defence, and, indeed, without even the
formality of a trial. Well did an eminent but thoughtful divine
of the Southern Presbyterian Church declare that "the method of
procedure to destroy evolution by the majority in the Church is
vicious and suicidal," and that "logical dynamite has been used
to put out a supposed fire in the upper stories of our house,
and all the family in the house at that." Wisely, too, did he
refer to the majority as "sowing in the fields of the Church
the thorns of its errors, and cumbering its path with the
debris and ruin of its own folly."
To these recent cases may be added the expulsion of Prof. Toy
from teaching under ecclesiastical control at Louisville, and
his election to a far more influential chair at Harvard
University; the driving out from the American College at Beyrout
of the young professors who accepted evolution as probable, and
the rise of one of them, Mr. Nimr, to a far more commanding
position than that which he left—the control of three leading
journals at Cairo; the driving out of Robertson Smith from his
position at Edinburgh, and his reception into the far more
important and influential professorship at the English
University of Cambridge; and multitudes of similar cases. From
the days when Henry Dunster, the first President of Harvard
College, was driven from his presidency, as Cotton Mather said,
for "falling into the briers of Antipedobaptism" until now,
the same spirit is shown in all such attempts. In each we have
generally, on one side, a body of older theologians, who since
their youth have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, sundry
professors who do not wish to rewrite their lectures, and a mass
of unthinking ecclesiastical persons of little or no importance
save in making up a retrograde majority in an ecclesiastical
tribunal; on the other side we have as generally the thinking,
open-minded, devoted men who have listened to the revelation of
their own time as well as of times past, and who are evidently
thinking the future thought of the world.
Here we have survivals of that same oppression of thought by
theology which has cost the modern world so dear; the system
which forced great numbers of professors, under penalty of
deprivation, to teach that the sun and planets revolve about the
earth; that comets are fire-balls flung by an angry God at a
wicked world; that insanity is diabolic possession; that
anatomical investigation of the human frame is sin against the
Holy Ghost; that chemistry leads to sorcery; that taking
interest for money is forbidden by Scripture; that geology must
conform to ancient Hebrew poetry. From the same source came in
Austria the rule of the "Immaculate Oath," under which
university professors, long before the dogma of the Immaculate
Conception was defined by the Church, were obliged to swear to
their belief in that dogma before they were permitted to teach
even arithmetic or geometry; in England, the denunciation of
inoculation against smallpox; in Scotland, the protests against
using chloroform in childbirth as "vitiating the primal curse
against woman"; in France, the use in clerical schools of a
historical text-book from which Napoleon was left out; and, in
America, the use of Catholic manuals in which the Inquisition is
declared to have been a purely civil tribunal, or Protestant
manuals in which the Puritans are shown to have been all that we
could now wish they had been.
So, too, among multitudes of similar efforts abroad, we have
during centuries the fettering of professors at English and
Scotch universities by test oaths, subscriptions to articles,
and catechisms without number. In our own country we have had in
a vast multitude of denominational colleges, as the first
qualification for a professorship, not ability in the subject to
be taught, but fidelity to the particular shibboleth of the
denomination controlling the college or university.
Happily, in these days such attempts generally defeat
themselves. The supposed victim is generally made a man of mark
by persecution, and advanced to a higher and wider sphere of
usefulness. In withstanding the march of scientific truth, any
Conference, Synod, Board of Commissioners, Board of Trustees, or
Faculty, is but as a nest of field-mice in the path of a steam plough.
The harm done to religion in these attempts is far greater than
that done to science; for thereby suspicions are widely spread,
especially among open-minded young men, that the accepted
Christian system demands a concealment of truth, with the
persecution of honest investigators, and therefore must be
false. Well was it said in substance by President McCosh, of
Princeton, that no more sure way of making unbelievers in
Christianity among young men could be devised than preaching to
them that the doctrines arrived at by the great scientific
thinkers of this period are opposed to religion.
Yet it is but justice here to say that more and more there is
evolving out of this past history of oppression a better spirit,
which is making itself manifest with power in the leading
religious bodies of the world. In the Church of Rome we have
to-day such utterances as those of St. George Mivart, declaring
that the Church must not attempt to interfere with science; that
the Almighty in the Galileo case gave her a distinct warning
that the priesthood of science must remain with the men of
science. In the Anglican Church and its American daughter we
have the acts and utterances of such men as Archbishop Tait,
Bishop Temple, Dean Stanley, Dean Farrar, and many others,
proving that the deepest religious thought is more and more
tending to peace rather than warfare with science; and in the
other churches, especially in America, while there is yet much
to be desired, the welcome extended in many of them to Alexander
Winchell, and the freedom given to views like his, augur well
for a better state of things in the future.
From the science of Anthropology, when rightly viewed as a
whole, has come the greatest aid to those who work to advance
religion rather than to promote any particular system of
theology; for Anthropology and its subsidiary sciences show more
and more that man, since coming upon the earth, has risen, from
the period when he had little, if any, idea of a great power
above him, through successive stages of fetichism, shamanism,
and idolatry, toward better forms of belief, making him more and
more accessible to nobler forms of religion. The same sciences
show, too, within the historic period, the same tendency, and
especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a
progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in
the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament
Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god
above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous
God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such
inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great
passages in Isaiah, the sublime preaching of Micah, and, above
all, through the ideal given to the world by Jesus of Nazareth.
Well indeed has an eminent divine of the Church of England in
our own time called on Christians to rejoice over this
evolution, "between the God of Samuel, who ordered infants to
be slaughtered, and the God of the Psalmist, whose tender
mercies are over all his works; between the God of the
Patriarchs, who was always repenting, and the God of the
Apostles, who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, with
whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, between the
God of the Old Testament, who walked in the garden in the cool
of the day, and the God of the New Testament, whom no man hath
seen nor can see; between the God of Leviticus, who was so
particular about the sacrificial furniture and utensils, and the
God of the Acts, who dwelleth not in temples made with hands;
between the God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, and the God who
will have all men to be saved; between the God of Exodus, who is
merciful only to those who love him, and the God of Christ—the
heavenly Father—who is kind unto the unthankful and the evil."
However overwhelming, then, the facts may be which Anthropology,
History, and their kindred sciences may, in the interest of
simple truth, establish against the theological doctrine of
"the Fall"; however completely they may fossilize various
dogmas, catechisms, creeds, confessions, "plans of salvation"
and "schemes of redemption," which have been evolved from the
great minds of the theological period: science, so far from
making inroads on religion, or even upon our Christian
development of it, will strengthen all that is essential in it,
giving new and nobler paths to man's highest aspirations. For
the one great, legitimate, scientific conclusion of anthropology
is, that, more and more, a better civilization of the world,
despite all its survivals of savagery and barbarism, is
developing men and women on whom the declarations of the nobler
Psalms, of Isaiah, of Micah, the Sermon on the Mount, the first
great commandment, and the second, which is like unto it, St.
Paul's praise of charity and St. James's definition of "pure
religion and undefiled," can take stronger hold for the more
effective and more rapid uplifting of our race.