S. Laing

“ Why should not common sense equally step in, and say of the narrative of the Garden of Eden with its trees of Knowledge and of Life, that here is an obvious allegory, stating the problem which has perplexed so many generations of men, of the origin of evil, man's dual nature, and how to reconcile the fact of the existence of sin and suffering with the theory of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator? ”

“ The Great Pyramid must have been built on a plan designed from the first, and not by any haphazard process of adding a layer each year according to the number of years the monarch happened to reign. How could he foresee the exact number of years of an unusually long life and reign, or what security could he have that, if he died early, his successor would complete his pyramid in addition to erecting one of almost equal magnitude for himself? ”

“ It is only after a long progress in civilization that ideas of personal sin and righteousness, of an overruling justice and goodness, of future rewards and punishments, are developed from the cruder conceptions and superstitious observances of earlier times. It was a long road from the jealous and savage local god of the Hebrew tribes, who smelt the sweet savour of burnt sacrifices and was pleased, and who commanded the extermination of enemies, and the slaughter of women and children, to the Supreme Jehovah, who loved justice and mercy better than the blood of bulls and rams. ”

“ When we turn to the Fine Arts we find the same evidence. The difficulty is not to trace a golden age up to rude beginnings, but to explain the seeming paradox that the oldest art is the best. A visit to the Museum of Boulak, where Mariette's collection of works of the first six dynasties is deposited, will convince any one that the statues, statuettes, wall-pictures, and other works of art of the Ancient Empire from Memphis and its cemetery of Sakkarah, are in point of conception and execution superior to those of a later period. ”

“ There are an almost endless number of minor varieties of the human race, but none of them of sufficient importance to imply diversity of origin, with the exception of four, or at the most five or six fundamental types, which stand so widely apart that it is difficult to imagine that they are all descended from a common pair of ancestors. These are the white, yellow, and black races of the Old World, the copper-coloured of America, and perhaps the olive-coloured of Malaysia and Polynesia, and the pygmy races of Africa and Eastern Asia. ”

“ The position of women is one of the surest tests of an advanced civilization; for in rude times, and among savage races, force reigns supreme, and the weaker sex is always the slave or drudge of the stronger one. It is only when intellectual and moral considerations are firmly established that the claims of women to an equality begin to be recognized. Now in the earliest records of domestic and political life in Egypt, we find this equality more fully recognized than it is perhaps among ourselves in the nineteenth century. ”

“ The religious ideas of a nation afford a pretty good test of the antiquity of its civilization. Thus, if 5000 years hence all traces of England being lost except a copy of the Athanasian Creed, it would be a legitimate inference that the race who retained such a creed as part of their ritual, had long passed the primitive period of fetichism or animism, had schools of priests and philosophers, and that their religion had developed into a stage of subtle and profound metaphysical speculations. ”

“ All we can infer with certainty is, that whether the neolithic period be of longer or shorter duration, no changes have taken place in the animal fauna contemporary with man which cannot be traced to human agency or other known causes. No new species have appeared, or old ones disappeared, in the course of natural evolution, as was the case during the quaternary and preceding geological periods.
The neolithic is, however, a mere drop in the ocean of time compared with the earlier periods in which the existence of palæolithic man can be traced by his remains ”

“ But this does not meet the difficulty of accounting, if we place the origin of man from a single pair anywhere in the northern hemisphere, for his presence in palæolithic times in South Africa and South America. How did he get across the equatorial zone, in which only a tropical fauna, including the tropical Negro, can now live and flourish? Or vice versâ, if the original Adam and Eve were black, and the Garden of Eden situated in the tropics, how did their descendants migrate northwards, and live on the skirts of the ice-caps of the glacial period? ”

“ It is quite conceivable that, on the hypothesis of a Divine Creator, one step in the majestic evolution from the original impress should have been that men of genius and devout nature should write books containing juster notions of man's relations to his Maker than prevailed in the polytheisms of early civilizations, and thus gradually educating a peculiar people who accepted these writings as sacred, and preparing the ground for a still higher and purer religion. ”

“ In colour, hair, volume of brain, form of skull, stature, and a hundred other peculiarities, the Negro and the European stand further apart than those anthropoids do from one another, and no naturalist from Mars or Saturn, investigating the human family for the first time, and free from prepossession, would hesitate to class the white, black, yellow, red, and perhaps five or six other varieties, as different species. ”

“ This mass of twenty-eight miles in thickness of earth and ocean must be thrown out of the old position, and driven to establish a new equilibrium in a position many degrees north or south of it in order to affect climates materially, submerging all existing lands, and leaving, until removed by denudation, miles upon miles of solid earth in unsymmetrical belts, like the moraines of retreating glaciers, as the equator shifted into new positions. And all this must have occurred, not once, but twice at least, and that with many minor vicissitudes, within the narrow limit of the quaternary period. ”

“ Who, standing on the edge of the lofty cliff at Bournemouth, and gazing over the wide expanse of waters between the present shore and a line connecting the Needles on the one hand and the Ballard-Down Foreland on the other, can fully comprehend how immensely remote was the epoch when what is now that vast bay was high and dry land, and a long range of chalk downs, 600 feet above the sea, bounded the horizon on the south? ”

“ It is perfectly evident from the admitted existence of man throughout the Quaternary period, already spread over a great part of the earth's surface, and divided into distinct types, that if there is any truth in evolution, mankind must have had a long previous existence. The only other possible alternative would be the special miraculous creations of men of several different types, and in many different centres, at the particular period of time when the Tertiary was replaced by the Quaternary. ”

“ Instead of an ark, there is a ship with a steersman, which was certainly more likely to survive the perils of a long voyage on the stormy waters of an universal ocean. The duration of the Deluge and of the voyage is shortened from a year to a little more than a month; more human beings are saved, as Hasisadra takes on board not his own family only, but several of his friends and relations; and the difficulty of repeopling the earth from a single centre is diminished by throwing the date of the Deluge back to an immense and mythical antiquity. ”

“ Even with a people so far advanced as the early Greeks, it meets us in the celebrated fable of Deucalion and Pyrrha peopling the earth by throwing stones behind them, which turned into men and women; and the same myth, of stones turning into the first men, meets us at the present day in almost every reliable myth of creation, brought home by missionaries and anthropologists from Africa, America, and Polynesia. ”

“ Piety to the gods, loyalty to the throne, obedience to superiors, justice and mercy to inferiors, and observance of all the principal moral laws, and especially that of truthfulness, were enforced by the conviction that no sooner had the breath departed from the body, and it had been deposited as a mummy, with its Ka or second shadowy self, in the tomb, than the soul would have to appear before the supreme judge Osiris, and the forty-two heavenly jurors, where it would have to confess the naked truth, and be tried and rewarded or punished according to its merits. ”

“ Hence the course of the heavens was carefully watched, the stars were mapped out into constellations, through which the progress of the sun and planets was recorded; and myths sprang into existence based on the sun's daily rising and setting, and its annual journey through the seasons and the signs of the zodiac. Mixed up with astronomy was astrology, which, watching the sun, moon, and five planets, inferred life from motion, and recognized Gods exerting a divine influence on human events. ”

“ It had no doubt a great deal to do with launching Egypt on a career of foreign wars and conquests under the eighteenth dynasty, and so bringing it into closer contact with other nations, and subjecting it to the vicissitudes of alternate triumphs and disasters, now carrying the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris, 177 and now bringing Assyrian and Persian conquerors to Thebes and Memphis. But in the older ages of the First and Middle Empire, the ox, the ass, the sheep, ducks and geese, and the dog, seem to have been the principal domestic animals. ”

“ We believe that they are inspired by the Holy Ghost; that they are what they profess to be; that they mean what they say; and that they declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past events, and of the delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled."
It is perfectly obvious that for those who accept these Confessions of Faith, not only the so-called "higher Biblical Criticism," but all the discoveries of modern science, from Galileo and Newton down to Lyall and Darwin, are simple delusions. ”

“ The people also, both in Egypt and Chaldæa, seem to have been singularly like the modern Chinese, patient industrious, submissive to authority, unwarlike, practical, and prosaic. Everything, therefore, conspires to prove that an enormous time must have elapsed before the dawn of history 7000 years ago, to convert the aborigines who left their rude stone implements in the sands and gravels of these localities, into the civilized and populous communities which we find existing there long before the reigns of Menes and of Sargon. ”

“ And surely, in these days, when faith in direct inspiration has been so rudely shaken, it must be consoling to many enlightened Christians to find that the fundamental articles of their creed, trinities, emanations, incarnations, atonements, a future life and day of judgment, are not the isolated conceptions of a minority of the human race in recent times, but have been held from a remote antiquity by all the nations which have taken a leading part in civilization. ”

“ The human race repeats this lesson of the animal world, and shows a graduated scale of fertility and permanence in crosses, between different types according as they are closely or distantly related. Thus if we take the two extremes, the blond white of North temperate Europe and the Negro of Equatorial Africa, the disposition to union is almost replaced by repugnance which is only overcome under special circumstances, such as slavery, and an absence of women of their own race ”

“ In the face of this mass of evidence, from both the Old and New Worlds, it seems more like obstinate incredulity than scientific caution to deny the existence of Tertiary man. Indeed the objections put forward by those who still cling to the notion that any proofs of greater antiquity of man take them further back from the orthodox standpoint of Genesis, are sufficient of themselves to show the straits to which they are driven to explain the facts. ”

“ In any case the safer plan is to propitiate them by worship and sacrifice.
From these rude beginnings we see nations as they advance in civilization rising to higher conceptions, developing their ghosts into gods, and confining their operations to the greater phenomena of Nature, such as the sky, the earth, the sea, the sun, the stars, storms, seasons, thunder, and the like. And by degrees the unity of Nature begins to be felt by the higher minds; priestly castes are established who have leisure for meditation; ideas are transmitted from generation to generation ”

“ He was in fact a later and greater Kudur-Na-hangti, like the early conqueror of that name who founded the first Elamite empire some 1800 years earlier. It may be doubtful whether he was even an Aryan. At any rate this much is certain, that his religion was Babylonian, and that we must dismiss all Jewish myths of him as a Zoroastrian Monotheist, the servant of the most high God, who favoured the chosen race from sympathy with their religion. On his own showing he was as devoted a worshipper of Merodach, Bel, and Nebo, and the whole pantheon of local gods, as Nebuchadnezzar or Tiglath-Pileser. ”

“ The fundamental idea was that of a primitive ocean, or, if you like to call it chaos, of nebulous matter without form and void, and of a one infinite and eternal God who evolved himself and the Universe from his own essence. He is called in the Todtenbuch "the one only being, the sole Creator, unchangeable in his infinite perfection, present in all time, past and future, everywhere and yet nowhere." But although one in essence, God is not one in person. He exists as Father, but reproduces himself under another aspect as Mother, and under a third as Son. ”