the measure of which will be our capability and fitness. Unclouded by fumes of laboratories, untainted by sensual appetite, unhindered by life's ills and weaknesses, we presume that we shall not travel by present methods of logical reason, but be nourished and grow in truth by mental assimilation. The process being somewhat akin to the present work of the Holy Ghost (John xvi. 13). The soul, combining with itself every element of knowledge, not wasting force, will advance in continuous power to know more and more of that grand order in which God shows His glory. 1 Accepting "Development" as a fact, "Adam is the princeps, and so the ideal prius of the creaturely world."1 Using the idea of "Natural Selection," so far as it conceives an intelligent work in the world, conversion of the lower into the higher by heredity, adaptation, variation, distribution; man is something more than a material organism. His structure, wonderful as it is, does not even approximately represent his essential nature. With a large difference in structure, between the lower apes and the gorilla, we find a moderate and measurable advance; but, with a less marked difference between the gorilla and man, we have an immeasurable and practically infinite divergence of nature.2 Man's chamber of consciousness is the meetingplace of the material and the spiritual; he forms antithetical conceptions of both; correlates their energies; and, in part, understands the wonderful machinery, of which he is a portion, that bestows hope and persuasion of going upward. Change and enlarge the view-Man, the highest animal, an actual microcosm, represents all organic life in the world. Represents it, being taken from the ground; yet excels it, by superior mechanism, with use of mental and moral faculties. His mechanism, an improvement of all that had gone before; but the organism, nearest to him, the Anthropoid Ape, the Gibbon rather than the Gorilla, is not a diminution of the human; but a formation by lateral and diverging operation which, however long continued, could never arrive at man. "The two series, ape and man, diverge from one another . . . the youthful individuals are more alike than the older ones. . . the ape, as he grows, 1 "Lange on Genesis," p. 211. English translation. 2 "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature," p. 103: Prof. Huxley. Our Spirit a Habitation of God. 289 becomes more bestial; man more human.' The best in us being dissevered from the worst by a process which batters the worst to destruction. The moral and spiritual powers, summed in one word, Soul, cannot be explained by the material properties of protoplasm, nor find an equivalent in mechanical adjustment, nor is the soul made of psychical bits which have passed through the life and mind of lower animals. The dog possesses attention, abstraction, imagination, judgment, desire, grief—indeed, a share of many intellectual faculties and emotional passions. The dog, the cat, the parrot, return love for our love, and hatred for our hatred; they are capable of shame and sorrow: and, though they may have no logic nor conscious ratiocination, no one who has watched their ways can doubt that they possess that power of rational cerebration which evolves reasonable acts from the premises furnished by the senses-a process which takes fully as large a share as conscious reason in human activity." The soul is very much more than this. When we can conceive the nature of matter apart from its properties, when we know the embodiment of the inner man, when we know our spirit as a habitation of the Living God, then we may begin to investigate the nature of the soul; at present we have neither power to understand it nor words to describe it; but we take it as that which made our great King Alfred say "I desired to live worthily while I lived; and after my life leave to men a remembrance in good works." The withering conclusions of atheists as to the mortality of our soul are unwarrantable and unscientific. If matter cannot be annihilated, it appears highly unscientific to assert that the spirit in man, which subdues and rules matter, is less enduring. The conservation of energy is antagonistic to the utter loss of that great mental energy which subjects the physical world. We pity that flippancy which contemns this high spiritual gift; and pray not only for the unwise who would refuse, but for the rash who neglect the glorious distinction; which makes the past present, the far-off near, the unseen visible, and unveils the higher worlds. "Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism :" Prof. Schmidt. 26 Antiquity of Man," p. 495: Sir Charles Lyell. U As to the soul "It cometh from afar Not in entire forgetfulness But trailing clouds of glory do we come William Wordsworth. We are rudely aroused from joy in this perpetual benediction of Heaven; and degraded by grovelling hypothesis to bestial fellowship. We, scions of a noble house, are told— "You are not of honourable birth, you lie down with a dogtwist, your laugh is taken from the hyæna, your song from the mocking-bird, your tears from the crocodile, and your speech from animal cries. You are not a child of God, morally and intellectually endowed; you crawled into existence through many brutal shapes" "Quum prorepserunt primis animalia terris." "When men first crept out of the earth, a dumb and filthy herd, they fought for acorns and lurking-places with their nails and fists; then with clubs; and, at last, with arms which, taught by experience, they had forged. They invented names for things, and words to express their thoughts, began to fortify cities and to enact laws." We will not multiply classical quotations; writers of our own day assert" Men, originally brutes, attained nobleness of mind. Before and during the transition they were not men, but creatures without the spiritual part of our being; nor endowed with the awful attribute of immortality." It may be put more definitely-there was a common point from which the present apes and men were derived. No greater difference exists between a man and a brute, than between one brute and another brute. Some animals are very upright, some men are very hairy. "The soul of a newborn infant is, in its manifestations, no way different from that of the young animal."1 Negroes and Indians are a low sort of men, but not so low as the Australian and Papuan; all these have not got on, and are left behind the average individuals of our race. Hence the fear of Mephistopheles lest men should be alarmed at finding themselves too much like God, is now changed into the dread of being "The Doctrine of Descent:" Prof. Schmidt. Sheepish Men. 291 too much like sheep. The course of transformations, we are gravely assured, was along the vertebral column; we have only to look at the first vertebra of a sheep's neck and the last tail-bone to see our identity established, and the gradual transition exemplified. The ape struck out a disastrous path, persisting in a brain of small volume, and a large air-sac in his throat; but man selected a high conformation of well-formed plastic cranium and aborted the sac. Young monkeys and calves are still like us, they have not the bony skull and horns which are afterwards developed. One rather likes the humour; clever men are evidently making fun for us. The monkey has been given up, and now we are sheep of improved breed between them and the monkey. The change is too sudden. If it is hard to see how from the monkey's foot, which has extra muscles, rendering it a foot-hand for climbing and grasping, could have been evolved the flat treading and walking human foot; it is yet harder to have got it from a sheep's trotter. As for monkey, when did man get rid of throat-sacs; of intermediate wrist-bone? and when obtain the glutei and the muscles of his leg calf? It is clear the matter of these men, who so reason, is mingled most with folly. Reason? we are told man cannot be widely separated from the lower creatures; for little children do not manifest great intelligence. Human progress is regulated by speech; dogs talk, and are confessedly more civilised and intelligent than the wolf and stupid jackal; "who can question that they, like men, have raised themselves mentally far above their ancestry?" Who can "doubt that the honey bee, as it gradually attained bodily advantages and peculiarities, developed likewise the higher mental powers, corresponding with the more minute and complex organism of the brain?" Even tame seals come like dogs at the call of their keeper. Such reasoning confirms Scripture-" Man that is in honour and understandeth not is like unto beasts that perish" (Ps. xlix. 20). "As to free will, little," we are told, “ can be said for that; the individual mostly acts upon the will of the tribeI might say of the herd." "The astonishing premeditation with which some few happily organised individuals, of some few species, turn circumstances to account with apparently complete free will," disposes of our conceit as to human freedom. As to conscience, there are very conscientious dogs, and some animals dream. "That highly interesting dwarf people, the Niam Niam of Central Africa, are said to have no word for God; and therefore, it must be supposed, not the idea." As to progress in art, science, agriculture, architecture, the tactual sense common to every creature, is mother of it all. With regard to languages, they have been developed. When there were races and no nations, man was a speechless animal. All languages have progressed: first the root, then the stem, after that a determinative element. In the root state, articulate sounds grew into words; in the stem stage, the words stuck together, and formed the agglutinated languages; finally the whole stood complete with inflexions in the speech of many nations. Those who give this stuff as science, of course, say to one another— "Begone to thy stone! for thy coffin is scant of thee, See that there thou bide thee." They conclude that inhuman beings gradually became human; while with language, the work of many years, reason made its appearance. Some complete this sketch by imagining a miserable ape, crossed in love, or pining with cold, conceiving in its poor addled pate, "the dread of evil to come:" so he became the father of morality and theology, very patriarch of the old worthies. Fortunately for mankind no actual legislators have ever been quite so foolish as some philosophers.' "Dieu me garde d'être savant Les plus doctes, le plus souvent, Sont les plus sottes gens du monde." There are three centres around which the Animal-Theory Arguments cluster: i. Man was originally a brute. ii. Human Language was developed from animal cries. iii. The Process of Development was by Civilisation. i. Man was originally a Brute. For a long time we counted ourselves of ancient and honourable family; but now, because the beaver builds 1 "The Reign of Law :" Duke of Argyll. |