Part 5 (2/2)
Says he, ”I have been counselled to recognize that the idea of evolution at present ruling the scientific world must also rule in the investigation of religion. I am not unacquainted with the literature of the subject, I have described animistic heathenism as concretely as I could; I confined myself strictly to that. I began with the facts of experience; then I drew inferences from them. If these do not agree with the dominant hypothesis of evolution, that is due to the brutal facts, and not to the prepossessions of the observer.
”I do not deny that something can be said for the idea of evolution in the religions of mankind, but the study of Animism, with which I have long been familiar as an eyewitness, did not lead me to that idea.
Rather the conviction which I arrived at is, that animistic heathenism is not a transition stage to a higher religion. There are no facts to prove that animistic heathenism somewhere and somehow evolved upwards towards a purer knowledge of G.o.d. I have worked as a missionary for many years in contact with thousands of the adherents of animistic heathenism and I have been convinced that the force of that heathenism is hostile to G.o.d.”
In the same work Dr. Warneck says that among the Battaks of Sumatra there are ”remains of a pure idea of G.o.d.” but there is also a host of spirits, born of fear, which thrust themselves between G.o.d and man. ”The idea of G.o.d which is found in the religions of the Indian Archipelago, and probably also of Africa, cannot have been distilled from the motley jumble of G.o.ds and of nature, for it exists in direct opposition to the latter. The idea of G.o.d is preserved, but His wors.h.i.+p is lost.” In reviewing this book the late Dr. Schmauk said in 1910: ”A dispa.s.sionate study of heathen religions confirms the view of Paul that heathenism is a fall from a better knowledge of G.o.d. The idols come between G.o.d and man.”
W. St. Clair Tisdale, concludes an exhaustive study of _”Christianity and Other Faiths”_ with the statement: ”It follows that Monotheism historically preceded Polytheism, and that the latter is a corruption of the former. It is impossible to explain the facts away. Taken together they show that, as the Bible a.s.serts, man at the very beginning of history knew the One True G.o.d. This implies a Revelation of some sort and traces of that Revelation are still found in many ancient faiths.”
We conclude that the history of religion does not only fail to support the evolutionistic postulate of a slow upward development of religions from crude original beliefs, but quite the reverse. It is true that the popular handbooks of comparative religion quite generally teach a development of religious belief through animism, fetis.h.i.+sm, and polytheism to monotheism. But the consonant testimony of specialists in the field of historical study and of those who have had first-hand acquaintance with the aborigines of heathen lands, is a strong dissent from this position. Here again we find confident a.s.sertion of an evolutionistic process mainly among those who lack the qualifications of original research. Even as it is not the specialist in biology that still maintains the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection, but the non-professional and the amateur, even so the specialist acquainted with the original sources, and the explorer, possessing first hand knowledge, a.s.serts a decline, through history, from purer to less spiritual faiths, while the bias of the evolutionist, who has no first hand knowledge of the sources constrains him to begin his scheme of religion with animism and fetish-wors.h.i.+p. The theory which holds him in thrall demands such a construction. But the theory is contradicted by the facts, which point unmistakably to a degeneration of the race, to a Fall of Man.
CHAPTER TEN.
The Verdict of History.
John Fiske, who, in the seventies of the last century, popularized Darwinism in the United States, a.s.serts that the scope of evolution is much wider than the organic field. ”There is no subject great or small”
he wrote in _”A Century of Science,”_ ”that has not come to be affected by this doctrine.” A development has been recognized in plants, mountains, oysters, subjunctive moods, and the confederacies of savage tribes (p. 35). Fiske is one of those defenders of the evolutionistic philosophy who irritate by reason of their c.o.c.ksureness. Hear him, in _”Darwinism and Other Essays_:” ”One could count on one's fingers the number of eminent naturalists who still decline to adopt it”--the Darwinian hypothesis. That was in 1876. To-day we know that one cannot on one finger the eminent naturalists of the present century who still accept it--Haeckel. It is possible that Fiske's extension of the development theory, along lines laid down by Herbert Spencer, to all human history, even to ”tribal confederacies,” is likewise subject to a revision. Indeed, it would seem that even without special or detailed knowledge, the failure of human history to conform with this universal law would be apparent. Consider once more the basic concepts of Evolution. They are two in number, 1. Everything that is, has been evolved, having been involved (potentially, as a possibility) in that which preceded it. Potentially, the feather of the blue-bird was in the speck of original protoplasm, potentially the flights of Dante's and Goethe's genius were in the primordial cell. All that has occurred in history has _developed_ out of antecedents. Furthermore: 2. All that exists has developed _according to natural laws_. Scientists have given up the law which Darwin called ”Natural Selection,” and Spencer himself cas.h.i.+ered the law which he had called ”Survival of the Fittest.” But evolutionists continue to a.s.sert that somehow, by the action of certain laws, that which exists has naturally--there is no need of divine Providence, overruling the affairs of men,--has naturally been developed out of its antecedents. And so history is read by the evolutionist. He sees in all the inst.i.tutions of civilization, in every department of culture, in the rise and fall of nations, the progress and decay of literatures, a result of natural laws, working out the evolution of human society as it exists to-day.
What, then, is the verdict of history? Does it conform to this scheme?
Is there a demonstrable development, by inherent forces, of human society, from lower to higher ranges of culture? Civilization [tr note: sic] have risen, civilizations have perished: is there in this traceable the working of natural law?
Dr. Emil Reich, in the _”Contemporary Review,”_ 1889. p. 45 ff. pointed out the failure of the development theory as applied to human culture.
Hebrew religion as well as the Hebrew state were not derived from Babylonian, Egyptian, Arabic or Hitt.i.te culture; Greek art is not a derivative product of Egyptian, a.s.syrian, or Phoenician art; Greek religion and mythology are not derived from other pagan systems; Roman law has not been developed out of Greek, Aryan, or Egyptian law; the English const.i.tutional form of government has no antecedents in German or Norman-French history; German music is not a result of development out of Dutch, French, or Italian music. Dr. Reich sums up the matter: ”Inst.i.tutions do not 'evolve,' nor are they 'derived,' they step into existence by fulguration”--sudden flashes--, ”by a process that is technically identical with the theological idea of creation. The whole concept of evolution does not at all apply to history.”
In this argument there is considerable force. For, indeed, what natural law can account for the rise of human inst.i.tutions, so infinitely diversified in their structure? Every age is divided into epochs, and at the center of each epoch there is some personage of force and genius.
But how did Cromwell, Lincoln, Bismarck arise? What force produced them?
Whence did they evolve? Yet without these three names, three great periods in the world's history would be meaningless.
By what combination of forces shall we say that the various geniuses have developed which, in a manner almost spectacular, rise before us as we study the literatures of the past? The youthful years of Shakespeare were spent under circ.u.mstances which might have produced in him one dull and unaspiring British country lout, like, as one egg to another, to a hundred thousand others who lived in his age. What made this one country boy the most astonis.h.i.+ng genius in all the history of literature? Study the youth of Robert Burns, of Heinrich Heine, or Coleridge, and then tell me why the first two should become the greatest lyric poets of their time, and the third, one of England's deepest thinkers? Why did they not develop, one into a satisfied Scottish farmer, the other into a peddler of notions, and the third into a fat and comfortable English banker?
We quote from an article which appeared in _”Theological Quarterly”_ some twenty years ago:
”What process of evolution resulted in the lives and deeds of such men as Alexander the Great, Julius Ceasar, [tr. note: sic] Constantine the Great, Luther, Napoleon I, and Bismarck? All these great makers of history were what they were far less in consequence and by the continuation of the course of previous events or developments, than largely in spite of the past and in direct opposition to forces which had worked together in shaping the condition of things with which they had to deal. The Macedonian empire would never have sprung into being but for an Alexander, in whose mind the chief facts for its realization were united. The Rome which Julius Ceasar [tr. note: sic] left behind him was not that which he had found, only carried forward to a new stage of development, but the embodiment of ideas conceived in his mind, a quant.i.ty which under G.o.d the greatest Roman had _made_ out of a quant.i.ty which he had found. The distinctive features of the Constantinian empire as compared with that of Diocletian, or of the tetrarchy of which he was the head, were not evolved from earlier political principles, but stood out in bold contrast and even in direct opposition to the very fundamentals of antique statesmans.h.i.+p, and so new in politics that even Constantine permitted them to slip away from his grasp long before the sunset of his life had come. Luther was not a more fully developed Hus or Savonarola, and the Reformation was not the more advanced stage or completion of a movement inaugurated by the Humanists, but a work of G.o.d the actuating spirit of which was as diametrically contrary to the rationalistic spirit which animated Erasmus and, in a measure, Zwingli and his abettors, as it was to anti-christian Rome,--which was in 1517 essentially what it had been in 1302, when Boniface VIII issued his bull _Unam sanctum_ as a definition of the rights and powers of Popery.
Napoleon did not carry onward but broke away from the tumult of French politics when he laid the greater part of western Europe at his feet, and the battle of Austerlitz and the rule of the Hundred Days were no more evolved from the French Revolution as by intrinsic necessity than the burning of Moscow and the Russian snows which turned to naught the campaign of 1812.” (A. L. Graebner.)
According to the theory we would expect that in the various departments of _art,_ perfection would be a late blossom, burgeoning forth only after ages of feeble experiment and attempt. But what are the facts? As we study the history of any art,--be it literature or any department of literature; be it architecture, sculpture, the domestic arts, or even the art of war,--we find the highest culmination either at points which specifically exclude the idea of a development or, indeed, perfection s.h.i.+nes forth in the very beginning, all subsequent art being decay and apostasy from that primal perfection.
In epic poetry, the greatest work does not stand at the end of a long period of development, but the first and oldest is the greatest. Nothing has ever been produced to equal the Iliad and Odyssey, written 900 B. C.
We have epics that will always hold a prominent place in literature, Virgil's Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, but neither these nor the many flights attempted into epic poetry before or since will be seriously considered as rivalling the rhapsodies of Homer.
The first novel ever written, Cervantes' Don Quijote, [tr. note: sic]
remains one of the greatest.
The oldest dramatists, Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, have never been surpa.s.sed.
And so in every department of art, the earliest stage of development seems to be the very most perfect. Pyramid building was a pastime of the earliest Pharaos; [tr. note: sic] the later did not attempt to rival these structures with any of their own. No finer jewelry can be produced to-day than the gold ornaments found in the oldest tombs of Egypt. The finest examples of East Indian architecture are the oldest. Gothic art was not a slow development but came to utter perfection in its earliest examples,--as in the Cathedral of Amiens.
Evolution represents the history of our race as a constant climb, from brute or near-brute beginnings, to ever higher forms of civilization, until the heights which our race has reached in the present century were attained. In reality, the reverse process, a constant and invariable process of degeneration characterizes the history of nations and peoples.
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