XVI Hasisadra’s Adventure
Some thousands of years ago, there was a city in Mesopotamia called Surippak. One night a strange dream came to a dweller therein, whose name, if rightly reported, was Hasisadra. The dream foretold the speedy coming of a great flood; and it warned Hasisadra to lose no time in building a ship, in which, when notice was given, he, his family and friends, with their domestic animals and a collection of the wild creatures and seed of plants of the land, might take refuge and be rescued from destruction. Hasisadra awoke, and at once acted upon the warning. A strong decked ship was built, and her sides were paid, inside and out, with the mineral pitch, or bitumen, with which the country abounded; the vessel’s seaworthiness was tested, the cargo was stowed away, and a trusty pilot or steersman appointed.
The promised signal arrived. Wife and friends embarked; Hasisadra, following, prudently “shut the door,” or, as we should say, put on the hatches; and Nes-Hea, the pilot, was left alone on deck to do his best for the ship. Thereupon a hurricane began to rage; rain fell in torrents; the subterranean waters burst forth; a deluge swept over the land, and the wind lashed it into waves sky high; heaven and earth became mingled in chaotic gloom. For six days and seven nights the gale raged, but the good ship held out until, on the seventh day, the storm lulled. Hasisadra ventured on deck; and, seeing nothing but a waste of waters strewed with floating corpses and wreck, wept over the destruction of his land and people. Far away, the mountains of Nizir were visible; the ship was steered for them and ran aground upon the higher land. Yet another seven days passed by. On the seventh, Hasisadra sent forth a dove, which found no resting place and returned; then he liberated a swallow, which also came back; finally, a raven was let loose, and that sagacious bird, when it found that the water had abated, came near the ship, but refused to return to it. Upon this, Hasisadra liberated the rest of the wild animals, which immediately dispersed in all directions, while he, with his family and friends, ascending a mountain hard by, offered sacrifices upon its summit to the gods.
The story thus given in summary abstract, told in an ancient Semitic dialect, is inscribed in cuneiform characters upon a tablet of burnt clay. Many thousands of such tablets, collected by Assurbanipal, King of Assyria in the middle of the seventh century B.C., were stored in the library of his palace at Nineveh; and, though in a sadly broken and mutilated condition, they have yielded a marvellous amount of information to the patient and sagacious labour which modern scholars have bestowed upon them. Among the multitude of documents of various kinds, this narrative of Hasisadra’s adventure has been found in a tolerably complete state. But Assyriologists agree that it is only a copy of a much more ancient work; and there are weighty reasons for believing that the story of Hasisadra’s flood was well known in Mesopotamia before the year 2000 B.C.
No doubt, then, we are in presence of a narrative which has all the authority which antiquity can confer; and it is proper to deal respectfully with it, even though it is quite as proper, and indeed necessary, to act no less respectfully towards ourselves; and, before professing to put implicit faith in it, to inquire what claim it has to be regarded as a serious account of an historical event.
It is of no use to appeal to contemporary history, although the annals of Babylonia, no less than those of Egypt, go much further back than 2000 B.C. All that can be said is, that the former are hardly consistent with the supposition that any catastrophe, competent to destroy all the population, has befallen the land since civilisation began, and that the latter are notoriously silent about deluges. In such a case as this, however, the silence of history does not leave the inquirer wholly at fault. Natural science has something to say when the phenomena of nature are in question. Natural science may be able to show, from the nature of the country, either that such an event as that described in the story is impossible, or at any rate highly improbable; or, on the other hand, that it is consonant with probability. In the former case, the narrative must be suspected or rejected; in the latter, no such summary verdict can be given: on the contrary, it must be admitted that the story may be true. And then, if certain strangely prevalent canons of criticism are accepted, and if the evidence that an event might have happened is to be accepted as proof that it did happen, Assyriologists will be at liberty to congratulate one another on the “confirmation by modern science” of the authority of their ancient books.
It will be interesting, therefore, to inquire how far the physical structure and the other conditions of the region in which Surippak was situated are compatible with such a flood as is described in the Assyrian record.
The scene of Hasisadra’s adventure is laid in the broad valley, six or seven hundred miles long, and hardly anywhere less than a hundred miles in width, which is traversed by the lower courses of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, and which is commonly known as the “Euphrates valley.” Rising, at the one end, into a hill country, which gradually passes into the Alpine heights of Armenia; and, at the other, dipping beneath the shallow waters of the head of the Persian Gulf, which continues in the same direction, from north-west to south-east, for some eight hundred miles farther, the floor of the valley presents a gradual slope, from eight hundred feet above the sea level to the depths of the southern end of the Persian Gulf. The boundary between sea and land, formed by the extremest mudflats of the delta of the two rivers, is but vaguely defined; and, year by year, it advances seaward. On the north-eastern side, the western frontier ranges of Persia rise abruptly to great heights; on the south-western side, a more gradual ascent leads to a table-land of less elevation, which, very broad in the south, where it is occupied by the deserts of Arabia and of Southern Syria, narrows, northwards, into the highlands of Palestine, and is continued by the ranges of the Lebanon, the Antilebanon, and the Taurus, into the highlands of Armenia.
The wide and gently inclined plain, thus inclosed between the gulf and the highlands, on each side and at its upper extremity, is distinguishable into two regions of very different character, one of which lies north, and the other south of the parallel of Hit, on the Euphrates. Except in the immediate vicinity of the river, the northern division is stony and scantily covered with vegetation, except in spring. Over the southern division, on the contrary, spreads a deep alluvial soil, in which even a pebble is rare; and which, though, under the existing misrule, mainly a waste of marsh and wilderness, needs only intelligent attention to become, as it was of old, the granary of western Asia. Except in the extreme south, the rainfall is small and the air dry. The heat in summer is intense, while bitterly cold northern blasts sweep the plain in winter. Whirlwinds are not uncommon; and, in the intervals of the periodical inundations, the fine, dry, powdery soil is swept, even by moderate breezes, into stifling clouds, or rather fogs, of dust. Low inequalities, elevations here and depressions there, diversify the surface of the alluvial region. The latter are occupied by enormous marshes, while the former support the permanent dwellings of the present scanty and miserable population.
In antiquity, so long as the canalisation of the country was properly carried out, the fertility of the alluvial plain enabled great and prosperous nations to have their home in the Euphrates valley. Its abundant clay furnished the materials for the masses of sun-dried and burnt bricks, the remains of which, in the shape of huge artificial mounds, still testify to both the magnitude and the industry of the population, thousands of years ago. Good cement is plentiful, while the bitumen, which wells from the rocks at Hit and elsewhere, not only answers the same purpose, but is used to this day, as it was in Hasisadra’s time, to pay the inside and the outside of boats.
In the broad lower course of the Euphrates, the stream rarely acquires a velocity of more than three miles an hour, while the lower Tigris attains double that rate in times of flood. The water of both great rivers is mainly derived from the northern and eastern highlands in Armenia and in Kurdistan, and stands at its lowest level in early autumn and in January. But when the snows accumulated in the upper basins of the great rivers, during the winter, melt under the hot sunshine of spring, they rapidly rise,171 and at length overflow their banks, covering the alluvial plain with a vast inland sea, interrupted only by the higher ridges and hummocks which form islands in a seemingly boundless expanse of water.
In the occurrence of these annual inundations lies one of several resemblances between the valley of the Euphrates and that of the Nile. But there are important differences. The time of the annual flood is reversed, the Nile being highest in autumn and winter, and lowest in spring and early summer. The periodical overflows of the Nile, regulated by the great lake basins in the south, are usually punctual in arrival, gradual in growth, and beneficial in operation. No lakes are interposed between the mountain torrents of the upper basis of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their lower courses. Hence, heavy rain, or an unusually rapid thaw in the uplands, gives rise to the sudden irruption of a vast volume of water which not even the rapid Tigris, still less its more sluggish companion, can carry off in time to prevent violent and dangerous overflows. Without an elaborate system of canalisation, providing an escape for such sudden excesses of the supply of water, the annual floods of the Euphrates, and especially of the Tigris, must always be attended with risk, and often prove harmful.
There are other peculiarities of the Euphrates valley which may occasionally tend to exacerbate the evils attendant on the inundations. It is very subject to seismic disturbances; and the ordinary consequences of a sharp earthquake shock might be seriously complicated by its effect on a broad sheet of water. Moreover, the Indian Ocean lies within the region of typhoons; and if, at the height of an inundation, a hurricane from the south-east swept up the Persian Gulf, driving its shallow waters upon the delta and damming back the outflow, perhaps for hundreds of miles up-stream, a diluvial catastrophe, fairly up to the mark of Hasisadra’s, might easily result.172
Thus there seems to be no valid reason for rejecting Hasisadra’s story on physical grounds. I do not gather from the narrative that the “mountains of Nizir” were supposed to be submerged, but merely that they came into view above the distant horizon of the waters, as the vessel drove in that direction. Certainly the ship is not supposed to ground on any of their higher summits, for Hasisadra has to ascend a peak in order to offer his sacrifice. The country of Nizir lay on the north-eastern side of the Euphrates valley, about the courses of the two rivers Zab, which enter the Tigris where it traverses the plain of Assyria some eight or nine hundred feet above the sea; and, so far as I can judge from maps173 and other sources of information, it is possible, under the circumstances supposed, that such a ship as Hasisadra’s might drive before a southerly gale, over a continuously flooded country, until it grounded on some of the low hills between which both the lower and the upper Zab enter upon the Assyrian plain.
The tablet which contains the story under consideration is the eleventh of a series of twelve. Each of these answers to a month, and to the corresponding sign of the Zodiac. The Assyrian year began with the spring equinox; consequently, the eleventh month, called “the rainy,” answers to our January-February, and to the sign which corresponds with our Aquarius. The aquatic adventure of Hasisadra, therefore, is not inappropriately placed. It is curious, however, that the season thus indirectly assigned to the flood is not that of the present highest level of the rivers. It is too late for the winter rise and too early for the spring floods.
I think it must be admitted that, so far, the physical cross-examination to which Hasisadra has been subjected does not break down his story. On the contrary, he proves to have kept it in all essential respects174 within the bounds of probability or possibility. However, we have not yet done with him. For the conditions which obtained in the Euphrates valley, four or five thousand years ago, may have differed to such an extent from those which now exist that we should be able to convict him of having made up his tale. But here again everything is in favour of his credibility. Indeed, he may claim very powerful support, for it does not lie in the mouths of those who accept the authority of the Pentateuch to deny that the Euphrates valley was what it is, even six thousand years back. According to the book of Genesis, Phrat and Hiddekel—the Euphrates and the Tigris—are coeval with Paradise. An edition of the Scriptures, recently published under high authority, with an elaborate apparatus of “Helps” for the use of students—and therefore, as I am bound to suppose, purged of all statements that could by any possibility mislead the young—assigns the year B.C. 4004 as the date of Adam’s too brief residence in that locality.
But I am far from depending on this authority for the age of the Mesopotamian plain. On the contrary, I venture to rely, with much more confidence, on another kind of evidence, which tends to show that the age of the great rivers must be carried back to a date earlier than that at which our ingenuous youth is instructed that the earth came into existence. For, the alluvial deposit having been brought down by the rivers, they must needs be older than the plain it forms, as navvies must needs antecede the embankment painfully built up by the contents of their wheelbarrows. For thousands of years, heat and cold, rain, snow, and frost, the scrubbing of glaciers, and the scouring of torrents laden with sand and gravel, have been wearing down the rocks of the upper basins of the rivers, over an area of many thousand square miles; and these materials, ground to fine powder in the course of their long journey, have slowly subsided, as the water which carried them spread out and lost its velocity in the sea. It is because this process is still going on that the shore of the delta constantly encroaches on the head of the gulf175 into which the two rivers are constantly throwing the waste of Armenia and of Kurdistan. Hence, as might be expected, fluviatile and marine shells are common in the alluvial deposit; and Loftus found strata, containing subfossil marine shells of species now living, in the Persian Gulf, at Warka, two hundred miles in a straight line from the shore of the delta.176 It follows that, if a trustworthy estimate of the average rate of growth of the alluvial can be formed, the lowest limit (by no means the highest limit) of age of the rivers can be determined. All such estimates are beset with sources of error of very various kinds; and the best of them can only be regarded as approximations to the truth. But I think it will be quite safe to assume a maximum rate of growth of four miles in a century for the lower half of the alluvial plain.
Now, the cycle of narratives of which Hasisadra’s adventure forms a part contains allusions not only to Surippak, the exact position of which is doubtful, but to other cities, such as Erech. The vast ruins at the present village of Warka have been carefully explored and determined to be all that remains of that once great and flourishing city, “Erech the lofty.” Supposing that the two hundred miles of alluvial country, which separates them from the head of the Persian Gulf at present, have been deposited at the very high rate of four miles in a century, it will follow that 4000 years ago, or about the year 2100 B.C., the city of Erech still lay forty miles inland. Indeed, the city might have been built a thousand years earlier. Moreover, there is plenty of independent archæological and other evidence that in the whole thousand years, 2000 to 3000 B.C., the alluvial plain was inhabited by a numerous people, among whom industry, art, and literature had attained a very considerable development. And it can be shown that the physical conditions and the climate of the Euphrates valley, at that time, must have been extremely similar to what they are now.
Thus, once more, we reach the conclusion that, as a question of physical probability, there is no ground for objecting to the reality of Hasisadra’s adventure. It would be unreasonable to doubt that such a flood might have happened, and that such a person might have escaped in the way described, any time during the last 5000 years. And if the postulate of loose thinkers in search of scientific “confirmations” of questionable narratives—proof that an event may have happened is evidence that it did happen—is to be accepted, surely Hasisadra’s story is “confirmed by modern scientific investigation” beyond all cavil. However, it may be well to pause before adopting this conclusion, because the original story, of which I have set forth only the broad outlines, contains a great many statements which rest upon just the same foundation as those cited, and yet are hardly likely to meet with general acceptance. The account of the circumstances which led up to the flood, of those under which Hasisadra’s adventure was made known to his descendant, of certain remarkable incidents before and after the flood, are inseparably bound up with the details already given. And I am unable to discover any justification for arbitrarily picking out some of these and dubbing them historical verities, while rejecting the rest as legendary fictions. They stand or fall together.
Before proceeding to the consideration of these less satisfactory details, it is needful to remark that Hasisadra’s adventure is a mere episode in a cycle of stories of which a personage, whose name is provisionally read “Izdubar,” is the centre. The nature of Izdubar hovers vaguely between the heroic and the divine; sometimes he seems a mere man, sometimes approaches so closely to the divinities of fire and of the sun as to be hardly distinguishable from them. As I have already mentioned, the tablet which sets forth Hasisadra’s perils is one of twelve; and, since each of these represents a month and bears a story appropriate to the corresponding sign of the Zodiac, great weight must be attached to Sir Henry Rawlinson’s suggestion that the epos of Izdubar is a poetical embodiment of solar mythology.
In the earlier books of the epos, the hero, not content with rejecting the proffered love of the Chaldæan Aphrodite, Istar, freely expresses his very low estimate of her character; and it is interesting to observe that, even in this early stage of human experience, men had reached a conception of that law of nature which expresses the inevitable consequences of an imperfect appreciation of feminine charms. The injured goddess makes Izdubar’s life a burden to him, until at last, sick in body and sorry in mind, he is driven to seek aid and comfort from his forbears in the world of spirits. So this antitype of Odysseus journeys to the shore of the waters of death, and there takes ship with a Chaldæan Charon, who carries him within hail of his ancestor Hasisadra. That venerable personage not only gives Izdubar instructions how to regain his health, but tells him, somewhat à propos des bottes (after the manner of venerable personages), the long story of his perilous adventure; and how it befell that he, his wife, and his steersman came to dwell among the blessed gods, without passing through the portals of death like ordinary mortals.
According to the full story, the sins of mankind had become grievous; and, at a council of the gods, it was resolved to extirpate the whole race by a great flood. And, once more, let us note the uniformity of human experience. It would appear that, four thousand years ago, the obligations of confidential intercourse about matters of state were sometimes violated—of course from the best of motives. Ea, one of the three chiefs of the Chaldæan Pantheon, the god of justice and of practical wisdom, was also the god of the sea; and, yielding to the temptation to do a friend a good turn, irresistible to kindly seafaring folks of all ranks, he warned Hasisadra of what was coming. When Bel subsequently reproached him for this breach of confidence, Ea defended himself by declaring that he did not tell Hasisadra anything; he only sent him a dream. This was undoubtedly sailing very near the wind; but the attribution of a little benevolent obliquity of conduct to one of the highest of the gods is a trifle compared with the truly Homeric anthropomorphism which characterises other parts of the epos.
The Chaldæan deities are, in truth, extremely human; and, occasionally, the narrator does not scruple to represent them in a manner which is not only inconsistent with our idea of reverence, but is sometimes distinctly humorous.177 When the storm is at its height, he exhibits them flying in a state of panic to Anu, the god of heaven, and crouching before his portal like frightened dogs. As the smoke of Hasisadra’s sacrifice arises, the gods, attracted by the sweet savour, are compared to swarms of flies. I have already remarked that the lady Istar’s reputation is torn to shreds; while she and Ea scold Bel handsomely for his ferocity and injustice in destroying the innocent along with the guilty. One is reminded of Here hung up with weighted heels; of misleading dreams sent by Zeus; of Ares howling as he flies from the Trojan battlefield; and of the very questionable dealings of Aphrodite with Helen and Paris.
But to return to the story. Bel was, at first, excluded from the sacrifice as the author of all the mischief; which really was somewhat hard upon him, since the other gods agreed to his proposal. But eventually a reconciliation takes place; the great bow of Anu is displayed in the heavens; Bel agrees that he will be satisfied with what war, pestilence, famine, and wild beasts can do in the way of destroying men; and that, henceforward, he will not have recourse to extraordinary measures. Finally, it is Bel himself who, by way of making amends, transports Hasisadra, his wife, and the faithful Nes-Hea to the abode of the gods.
It is as indubitable as it is incomprehensible to most of us, that, for thousands of years, a great people, quite as intelligent as we are, and living in as high a state of civilisation as that which had been attained in the greater part of Europe a few centuries ago, entertained not the slightest doubt that Anu, Bel, Ea, Istar, and the rest, were real personages, possessed of boundless powers for good and evil. The sincerity of the monarchs whose inscriptions gratefully attribute their victories to Merodach, or to Assur, is as little to be questioned as that of the authors of the hymns and penitential psalms which give full expression to the heights and depths of religious devotion. An “infidel” bold enough to deny the existence, or to doubt the influence, of these deities probably did not exist in all Mesopotamia; and even constructive rebellion against their authority was apt to end in the deprivation, not merely of the good name, but of the skin of the offender. The adherents of modern theological systems dismiss these objects of the love and fear of a hundred generations of their equals, offhand, as “gods of the heathen,” mere creations of a wicked and idolatrous imagination; and, along with them, they disown, as senseless, the crude theology, with its gross anthropomorphism and its low ethical conception of the divinity, which satisfied the pious souls of Chaldæa.
I imagine, though I do not presume to be sure, that any endeavour to save the intellectual and moral credit of Chaldæan religion, by suggesting the application to it of that universal solvent of absurdities, the allegorical method, would be scouted; I will not even suggest that any ingenuity can be equal to the discovery of the antitypes of the personifications effected by the religious imagination of later ages, in the triad Anu, Ea, and Bel, still less in Istar. Therefore, unless some plausible reconciliatory scheme should be propounded by a Neo-Chaldæan devotee (and, with Neo-Buddhists to the fore, this supposition is not so wild as it looks), I suppose the moderns will continue to smile, in a superior way, at the grievous absurdity of the polytheistic idolatry of these ancient people.
It is probably a congenital absence of some faculty which I ought to possess which withholds me from adopting this summary procedure. But I am not ashamed to share David Hume’s want of ability to discover that polytheism is, in itself, altogether absurd. If we are bound, or permitted, to judge the government of the world by human standards, it appears to me that directorates are proved, by familiar experience, to conduct the largest and the most complicated concerns quite as well as solitary despots. I have never been able to see why the hypothesis of a divine syndicate should be found guilty of innate absurdity. Those Assyrians, in particular, who held Assur to be the one supreme and creative deity, to whom all the other supernal powers were subordinate, might fairly ask that the essential difference between their system and that which obtains among the great majority of their modern theological critics should be demonstrated. In my apprehension, it is not the quantity, but the quality, of the persons, among whom the attributes of divinity are distributed, which is the serious matter. If the divine might is associated with no higher ethical attributes than those which obtain among ordinary men; if the divine intelligence is supposed to be so imperfect that it cannot foresee the consequences of its own contrivances; if the supernal powers can become furiously angry with the creatures of their omnipotence and, in their senseless wrath, destroy the innocent along with the guilty; or if they can show themselves to be as easily placated by presents and gross flattery as any oriental or occidental despot; if, in short, they are only stronger than mortal men and no better, as it must be admitted Hasisadra’s deities proved themselves to be—then, surely, it is time for us to look somewhat closely into their credentials, and to accept none but conclusive evidence of their existence.
To the majority of my respected contemporaries this reasoning will doubtless appear feeble, if not worse. However, to my mind, such are the only arguments by which the Chaldæan theology can be satisfactorily upset. So far from there being any ground for the belief that Ea, Anu, and Bel are, or ever were, real entities, it seems to me quite infinitely more probable that they are products of the religious imagination, such as are to be found everywhere and in all ages, so long as that imagination riots uncontrolled by scientific criticism.
It is on these grounds that I venture, at the risk of being called an atheist by the ghosts of all the principals of all the colleges of Babylonia, or by their living successors among the Neo-Chaldæans, if that sect should arise, to express my utter disbelief in the gods of Hasisadra. Hence, it follows, that I find Hasisadra’s account of their share in his adventure incredible; and, as the physical details of the flood are inseparable from its theophanic accompaniments, and are guaranteed by the same authority, I must let them go with the rest. The consistency of such details with probability counts for nothing. The inhabitants of Chaldæa must always have been familiar with inundations; probably no generation failed to witness an inundation which rose unusually high, or was rendered serious by coincident atmospheric, or other, disturbances. And the memory of the general features of any exceptionally severe and devastating flood, would be preserved by popular tradition for long ages. What, then, could be more natural than that a Chaldæan poet should seek for the incidents of a great catastrophe among such phenomena? In what other way than by such an appeal to their experience could he so surely awaken in his audience the tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is there for insisting that he must have had some individual flood in view, and that his history is historical, in the sense that the account of the effects of a hurricane in the Bay of Bengal, in the year 1875, is historical?
More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal, Berosus of Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote an account of the history of his country in Greek. The work of Berosus has vanished; but extracts from it—how far faithful is uncertain—have been preserved by later writers. Among these occurs the well-known story of the Deluge of Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as that of Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the building of the ship, the sending out of birds, the ascension of the hero, betray their common origin. But stories, like Madeira, acquire a heightened flavour with time and travel; and the version of Berosus is characterised by those circumstantial improbabilities which habitually gather round the legend of a legend. The later narrator knows the exact day of the month on which the flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated with Munchausenian precision at five stadia by two—say, half by one-fifth of an English mile. The ship runs aground among the “Gordæan mountains” to the south of Lake Van, in Armenia, beyond the limits of any imaginable real inundation of the Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have the assertion, worthy of the sailor who said that he had brought up one of Pharaoh’s chariot wheels on the fluke of his anchor in the Red Sea, that pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of the bitumen which they scraped off from the still extant remains of the mighty ship of Xisuthros.
Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid of critical faculty as most of his tribe, had found the version of Berosus, as well as another much nearer the original story; that, having too much respect for his authorities to make up a tertium quid of his own, out of the materials offered, he followed a practice, common enough among ancient and, particularly, among Semitic historians, of dividing both into fragments and piecing them together, without troubling himself very much about the resulting repetitions and inconsistencies; the product of such a primitive editorial operation would be a narrative analogous to that which treats of the Noachian deluge in the book of Genesis. For the Pentateuchal story is indubitably a patchwork, composed of fragments of at least two, different and partly discrepant, narratives, quilted together in such an inartistic fashion that the seams remain conspicuous. And, in the matter of circumstantial exaggeration, it in some respects excels even the second-hand legend of Berosus.
There is a certain practicality about the notion of taking refuge from floods and storms in a ship provided with a steersman; but, surely, no one who had ever seen more water than he could wade through would dream of facing even a moderate breeze, in a huge three-storied coffer, or box, three hundred cubits long, fifty wide and thirty high, left to drift without rudder or pilot.178 Not content with giving the exact year of Noah’s age in which the flood began, the Pentateuchal story adds the month and the day of the month. It is the Deity himself who “shuts in” Noah. The modest week assigned to the full deluge in Hasisadra’s story becomes forty days, in one of the Pentateuchal accounts, and a hundred and fifty in the other. The flood, which, in the version of Berosus, has grown so high as to cast the ship among the mountains of Armenia, is improved upon in the Hebrew account until it covers “all the high hills that were under the whole heaven”; and, when it begins to subside, the ark is left stranded on the summit of the highest peak, commonly identified with Ararat itself.
While the details of Hasisadra’s adventure are, at least, compatible with the physical conditions of the Euphrates valley, and, as we have seen, involve no catastrophe greater than such as might be brought under those conditions, many of the very precisely stated details of Noah’s flood contradict some of the best established results of scientific inquiry.
If it is certain that the alluvium of the Mesopotamian plain has been brought down by the Tigris and the Euphrates, then it is no less certain that the physical structure of the whole valley has persisted, without material modification, for many thousand years before the date assigned to the flood. If the summits, even of the moderately elevated ridges which immediately bound the valley, still more those of the Kurdish and Armenian mountains, were ever covered by water, for even forty days, that water must have extended over the whole earth. If the earth was thus covered, anywhere between 4000 and 5000 years ago, or, at any other time, since the higher terrestrial animals came into existence, they must have been destroyed from the whole face of it, as the Pentateuchal account declares they were three several times (Genesis vii. 21, 22, 23), in language which cannot be made more emphatic, or more solemn, than it is; and the present population must consist of the descendants of emigrants from the ark. And, if that is the case, then, as has often been pointed out, the sloths of the Brazilian forests, the kangaroos of Australia, the great tortoises of the Galapagos islands, must have respectively hobbled, hopped, and crawled over many thousand miles of land and sea from “Ararat” to their present habitations. Thus, the unquestionable facts of the geographical distribution of recent land animals, alone, form an insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of the assertion that the kinds of animals composing the present terrestrial fauna have been, at any time, universally destroyed in the way described in the Pentateuch.
It is upon this and other unimpeachable grounds, that, as I ventured to say some time ago, persons who are duly conversant with even the elements of natural science decline to take the Noachian deluge seriously; and that, as I also pointed out, candid theologians, who, without special scientific knowledge, have appreciated the weight of scientific arguments, have long since given it up. But, as Goethe has remarked, there is nothing more terrible than energetic ignorance179; and there are, even yet, very energetic people, who are neither candid, nor clearheaded, nor theologians, still less properly instructed in the elements of natural science, who make prodigious efforts to obscure the effect of these plain truths, and to conceal their real surrender of the historical character of Noah’s deluge under cover of the smoke of a great discharge of pseudoscientific artillery. They seem to imagine that the proofs which abound in all parts of the world, of large oscillations of the relative level of land and sea, combined with the probability that, when the sea-level was rising, sudden incursions of the sea, like that which broke in over Holland and formed the Zuyder Zee, may have often occurred, can be made to look like evidence that something that, by courtesy, might be called a general Deluge has really taken place. Their discursive energy drags misunderstood truth into their service; and “the glacial epoch” is as sure to crop up among them as King Charles’s head in a famous memorial—with about as much appropriateness. The old story of the raised beach on Moel Tryfaen is trotted out; though, even if the facts are as yet rightly interpreted, there is not a shadow of evidence that the change of sea-level in that locality was sudden, or that glacial Welshmen would have known it was taking place.180 Surely it is difficult to perceive the relevancy of bringing in something that happened in the glacial epoch (if it did happen) to account for the tradition of a flood in the Euphrates valley between 2000 and 3000 B.C. But the date of the Noachian flood is solidly fixed by the sole authority for it; no shuffling of the chronological data will carry it so far back as 3000 B.C.; and the Hebrew epos agrees with the Chaldæan in placing it after the development of a somewhat advanced civilisation. The only authority for the Noachian deluge assures us that, before it visited the earth, Cain had built cities; Jubal had invented harps and organs; while mankind had advanced so far beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that Tubal-cain was a worker in iron. Therefore, if the Noachian legend is to be taken for the history of an event which happened in the glacial epoch, we must revise our notions of pleistocene civilisation. On the other hand, if the Pentateuchal story only means something quite different, that happened somewhere else, thousands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes of its credit as history? I wonder what would be said to a modern historian who asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and then tried to justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the attempt to save the credit of the Noachian story by reference to something which is supposed to have happened in the far north, in the glacial epoch, is far more preposterous.
Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore some of the most important and well-known facts which bear upon the question. Anything more than a parochial acquaintance with physical geography and geology would suffice to remind its possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a standing protest against bringing such a deluge as that of Noah anywhere near it, either in historical times or in the course of that pleistocene period, of which the “great ice age” formed a part.
Judæa and Galilee, Moab and Gilead, occupy part of that extensive tableland at the summit of the western boundary of the Euphrates valley, to which I have already referred. If that valley had ever been filled with water to a height sufficient, not indeed to cover a third of Ararat, in the north, or half some of the mountains of the Persian frontier in the east, but to reach even four or five thousand feet, it must have stood over the Palestinian hog’s-back, and have filled, up to the brim, every depression on its surface. Therefore it could not have failed to fill that remarkable trench in which the Dead Sea, the Jordan, and the Sea of Galilee lie, and which is known as the “Jordan-Arabah” valley.
This long and deep hollow extends more than 200 miles, from near the site of ancient Dan in the north, to the water-parting at the head of the Wady Arabah in the south; and its deepest part, at the bottom of the basin of the Dead Sea, lies 2500 feet below the surface of the adjacent Mediterranean. The lowest portion of the rim of the Jordan-Arabah valley is situated at the village of El Fuleh, 257 feet above the Mediterranean. Everywhere else the circumjacent heights rise to a very much greater altitude. Hence, of the water which stood over the Syrian tableland, when as much drained off as could run away, enough would remain to form a “Mere” without an outlet, 2757 feet deep, over the present site of the Dead Sea. From this time forth, the level of the Palestinian mere could be lowered only by evaporation. It is an extremely interesting fact, which has happily escaped capture for the purposes of the energetic misunderstanding, that the valley, at one time, was filled, certainly within 150 feet of this height—probably higher. And it is almost equally certain, that the time at which this great Jordan-Arabah mere reached its highest level coincides with the glacial epoch. But then the evidence which goes to prove this, also leads to the conclusion that this state of things obtained at a period considerably older than even 4004 B.C., when the world, according to the “Helps” (or shall we say “Hindrances”) provided for the simple student of the Bible, was created; that it was not brought about by any diluvial catastrophe, but was the result of a change in the relative activities of certain natural operations which are quietly going on now; and that, since the level of the mere began to sink, many thousand years ago, no serious catastrophe of any description has affected the valley.
The evidence that the Jordan-Arabah valley really was once filled with water, the surface of which reached within 160 feet of the level of the pass of Jezrael, and possibly stood higher, is this: Remains of alluvial strata, containing shells of the freshwater mollusks which still inhabit the valley, worn down into terraces by waves which long rippled at the same level, and furrowed by the channels excavated by modern rainfalls, have been found at the former height; and they are repeated, at intervals, lower down, until the Ghor, or plain of the Jordan, itself an alluvial deposit, is reached. These strata attain a considerable thickness; and they indicate that the epoch at which the freshwater mere of Palestine reached its highest level is extremely remote; that its diminution has taken place very slowly, and with periods of rest, during which the first formed deposits were cut down into terraces. This conclusion is strikingly borne out by other facts. A volcanic region stretches from Galilee to Gilead and the Hauran, on each side of the northern end of the valley. Some of the streams of basaltic lava which have been thrown out from its craters and clefts in times of which history has no record, have run athwart the course of the Jordan itself, or of that of some of its tributary streams. The lava streams, therefore, must be of later date than the depressions they fill. And yet, where they have thus temporarily dammed the Jordan and the Jermuk, these streams have had time to cut through the hard basalts and lay bare the beds, over which, before the lava streams invaded them, they flowed.
In fact, the antiquity of the present Jordan-Arabah valley, as a hollow in a tableland, out of reach of the sea, and troubled by no diluvial or other disturbances, beyond the volcanic eruptions of Gilead and of Galilee, is vast, even as estimated by a geological standard. No marine deposits of later than miocene age occur in or about it; and there is every reason to believe that the Syro-Arabian plateau has been dry land, throughout the pliocene and later epochs, down to the present time. Raised beaches, containing recent shells, on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean and on those of the Red Sea, testify to a geologically recent change of the sea level to the extent of 250 or 300 feet, probably produced by the slow elevation of the land; and, as I have already remarked, the alluvial plain of the Euphrates and Tigris appears to have been affected in the same way though seemingly to a less extent. But of violent, or catastrophic, change there is no trace. Even the volcanic outbursts have flowed in even sheets over the old land surface; and the long lines of the horizontal terraces which remain, testify to the geological insignificance of such earthquakes as have taken place. It is, indeed, possible that the original formation of the valley may have been determined by the well-known fault, along which the western rocks are relatively depressed and the eastern elevated. But, whether that fault was effected slowly or quickly, and whenever it came into existence, the excavation of the valley to its present width, no less than the sculpturing of its steep walls and of the innumerable deep ravines which score them down to the very bottom, are indubitably due to the operation of rain and streams, during an enormous length of time, without interruption or disturbance of any magnitude. The alluvial deposits which have been mentioned are continued into the lateral ravines, and have more or less filled them. But, since the waters have been lowered, these deposits have been cut down to great depths, and are still being excavated by the present temporary, or permanent, streams. Hence, it follows, that all these ravines must have existed before the time at which the valley was occupied by the great mere. This fact acquires a peculiar importance when we proceed to consider the grounds for the conclusion that the old Palestinian mere attained its highest level in the cold period of the pleistocene epoch. It is well known that glaciers formerly came low down on the flanks of Lebanon and Antilebanon; indeed, the old moraines are the haunts of the few survivors of the famous cedars. This implies a perennial snowcap of great extent on Hermon; therefore, a vastly greater supply of water to the sources of the Jordan which rise on its flanks; and, in addition, such a total change in the general climate, that the innumerable Wadys, now traversed only by occasional storm torrents, must have been occupied by perennial streams. All this involves a lower annual temperature and a moist and rainy atmosphere. If such a change of meteorological conditions could be effected now, when the loss by evaporation from the surface of the Dead Sea salt-pan balances all the gain from the Jordan and other streams, the scale would be turned in the other direction. The waters of the Dead Sea would become diluted; its level would rise; it would cover, first the plain of the Jordan, then the lake of Galilee, then the middle Jordan between this lake and that of Huleh (the ancient Merom); and, finally, it would encroach, northwards, along the course of the upper Jordan, and, southwards, up the Wady Arabah, until it reached some 260 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, when it would attain a permanent level, by sending any superfluity through the pass of Jezrael to swell the waters of the Kishon, and flow thence into the Mediterranean.
Reverse the process, in consequence of the excess of loss by evaporation over gain by inflow, which must have set in as the climate of Syria changed after the end of the pleistocene epoch, and (without taking into consideration any other circumstances) the present state of things must eventually be reached—a concentrated saline solution in the deepest part of the valley—water, rather more charged with saline matter than ordinary fresh water, in the lower Jordan and the lake of Galilee—fresh waters, still largely derived from the snows of Hermon, in the upper Jordan and in Lake Huleh. But, if the full state of Jordan valley marks the glacial epoch, then it follows that the excavation of that valley by atmospheric agencies must have occupied an immense antecedent time—a large part, perhaps the whole, of the pliocene epoch; and we are thus forced to the conclusion that, since the miocene epoch, the physical conformation of the Holy Land has been substantially what it is now. It has been more or less rained upon, searched by earthquakes here and there, partially overflowed by lava streams, slowly raised (relatively to the sea-level) a few hundred feet. But there is not a shadow of ground for supposing that, throughout all this time, terrestrial animals have ceased to inhabit a large part of its surface; or that, in many parts, they have been, in any respect, incommoded by the changes which have taken place.
The evidence of the general stability of the physical conditions of Western Asia, which is furnished by Palestine and by the Euphrates Valley, is only fortified if we extend our view northwards to the Black Sea and the Caspian. The Caspian is a sort of magnified replica of the Dead Sea. The bottom of the deepest part of this vast inland mere is 3000 feet below the level of the Mediterranean, while its surface is lower by 85 feet. At present, it is separated, on the west, by wide spaces of dry land from the Black Sea, which has the same height as the Mediterranean, and, on the east, from the Aral, 138 feet above that level. The waters of the Black Sea, now in communication with the Mediterranean by the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, are salt, but become brackish northwards, where the rivers of the steppes pour in a great volume of fresh water. Those of the shallower northern half of the Caspian are similarly affected by the Volga and the Ural, while, in the shallow bays of the southern division, they become extremely saline in consequence of the intense evaporation. The Aral Sea, though supplied by the Jaxartes and the Oxus, has brackish water. There is evidence that, in the pliocene and pleistocene periods, to go no farther back, the strait of the Dardanelles did not exist, and that the vast area, from the valley of the Danube to that of the Jaxartes, was covered by brackish or, in some parts, fresh water to a height of at least 200 feet above the level of the Mediterranean. At the present time, the water-parting which separates the northern part of the basin of the Caspian from the vast plains traversed by the Tobol and the Obi, in their course to the Arctic Ocean, appears to be less than 200 feet above the latter. It would seem, therefore, to be very probable that, under the climatal conditions of part of the pleistocene period, the valley of the Obi played the same part in relation to the Ponto-Aralian sea, as that of the Kishon may have done to the great mere of the Jordan valley; and that the outflow formed the channel by which the well-known Arctic elements of the fauna of the Caspian entered it. For the fossil remains imbedded in the strata continuously deposited in the Aralo-Caspian area, since the latter end of the miocene epoch, show no sign that, from that time onward, it has ever been covered by sea water. Therefore, the supposition of a free inflow of the Arctic Ocean, which at one time was generally received, as well as that of various hypothetical deluges from that quarter, must be seriously questioned.
The Caspian and the Aral stand in somewhat the same relation to the vast basin of dry land in which they lie, as the Dead Sea and the lake of Galilee to the Jordan valley. They are the remains of a vast, mostly brackish, mere, which has dried up in consequence of the excess of evaporation over supply, since the cold and damp climate of the pleistocene epoch gave place to the increasing dryness and great summer heats of Central Asia in more modern times. The desiccation of the Aralo-Caspian basin, which communicated with the Black Sea only by a comparatively narrow and shallow strait along the present valley of Manytsch, the bottom of which was less than 100 feet above the Mediterranean, must have been vastly aided by the erosion of the strait of the Dardanelles towards the end of the pleistocene epoch, or perhaps later. For the result of thus opening a passage for the waters of the Black Sea into the Mediterranean must have been the gradual lowering of its level to that of the latter sea. When this process had gone so far as to bring down the Black Sea water to within less than a hundred feet of its present level, the strait of Manytsch ceased to exist; and the vast body of fresh water brought down by the Danube, the Dnieper, the Don, and other South Russian rivers was cut off from the Caspian, and eventually delivered into the Mediterranean. Thus, there is as conclusive evidence as one can well hope to obtain in these matters, that, north of the Euphrates valley, the physical geography of an area as large as all Central Europe has remained essentially unchanged, from the miocene period down to our time; just as, to the west of the Euphrates valley, Palestine has exhibited a similar persistence of geographical type. To the south, the valley of the Nile tells exactly the same story. The holes bored by miocene mollusks in the cliffs east and west of Cairo bear witness that, in the miocene epoch, it contained an arm of the sea, the bottom of which has since been gradually filled up by the alluvium of the Nile, and elevated to its present position. But the higher parts of the Mokattam and of the desert about Ghizeh, have been dry land from that time to this. Too little is known of the geology of Persia, at present, to allow any positive conclusion to be enunciated. But, taking the name to indicate the whole continental mass of Iran, between the valleys of the Indus and the Euphrates, the supposition that its physical geography has remained unchanged for an immensely long period is hardly rash. The country is, in fact, an enormous basin, surrounded on all sides by a mountainous rim, and subdivided within by ridges into plateaus and hollows, the bottom of the deepest of which, in the province of Seistan, probably descends to the level of the Indian Ocean. These depressions are occupied by salt marshes and deserts, in which the waters of the streams which flow down the sides of the basin are now dissipated by evaporation. I am acquainted with no evidence that the present Iranian basin was ever occupied by the sea; but the accumulations of gravel over a great extent of its surface indicate long-continued water action. It is, therefore, a fair presumption that large lakes have covered much of its present deserts, and that they have dried up by the operation of the same changed climatal conditions as those which have reduced the Caspian and the Dead Sea to their present dimensions.181
Thus it would seem that the Euphrates valley, the centre of the fabled Noachian deluge, is also the centre of a region covering some millions of square miles of the present continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa, in which all the facts, relevant to the argument, at present known, converge to the conclusion that, since the miocene epoch, the essential features of its physical geography have remained unchanged; that it has neither been depressed below the sea, nor swept by diluvial waters since that time; and that the Chaldean version of the legend of a flood in the Euphrates valley is, of all those which are extant, the only one which is even consistent with probability, since it depicts a local inundation not more severe than one which might be brought about by a concurrence of favourable conditions at the present day, and which might probably have been more easily effected when the Persian Gulf extended farther north. Hence, the recourse to the “glacial epoch” for some event which might colourably represent a flood, distinctly asserted by the only authority for it to have occurred in historical times, is peculiarly unfortunate. Even a Welsh antiquarian might hesitate over the supposition that a tradition of the fate of Moel Tryfaen, in the glacial epoch, had furnished the basis of fact for a legend which arose among people whose own experience abundantly supplied them with the needful precedents. Moreover, if evidence of interchanges of land and sea are to be accepted as “confirmations” of Noah’s deluge, there are plenty of sources for the tradition to be had much nearer than Wales.
The depression now filled by the Red Sea, for example, appears to be, geologically, of very recent origin. The later deposits found on its shores, two or three hundred feet above the sea level, contain no remains older than those of the present fauna; while, as I have already mentioned, the valley of the adjacent delta of the Nile was a gulf of the sea in miocene times. But there is not a particle of evidence that the change of relative level which admitted the waters of the Indian Ocean between Arabia and Africa, took place any faster than that which is now going on in Greenland and Scandinavia, and which has left their inhabitants undisturbed. Even more remarkable changes were effected, towards the end of, or since, the glacial epoch, over the region now occupied by the Levantine Mediterranean and the Ægean Sea. The eastern coast region of Asia Minor, the western of Greece, and many of the intermediate islands, exhibit thick masses of stratified deposits of later tertiary age and of purely lacustrine characters; and it is remarkable that, on the south side of the island of Crete, such masses present steep cliffs facing the sea, so that the southern boundary of the lake in which they were formed must have been situated where the sea now flows. Indeed, there are valid reasons for the supposition that the dry land once extended far to the west of the present Levantine coast, and not improbably forced the Nile to seek an outlet to the north-east of its present delta—a possibility of no small importance in relation to certain puzzling facts in the geographical distribution of animals in this region. At any rate, continuous land joined Asia Minor with the Balkan peninsula; and its surface bore deep freshwater lakes, apparently disconnected with the Ponto-Aralian sea. This state of things lasted long enough to allow of the formation of the thick lacustrine strata to which I have referred. I am not aware that there is the smallest ground for the assumption that the Ægean land was broken up in consequence of any of the “catastrophes” which are so commonly invoked.182 For anything that appears to the contrary, the narrow, steep-sided, straits between the islands of the Ægean archipelago may have been originally brought about by ordinary atmospheric and stream action; and then filled from the Mediterranean, during a slow submergence proceeding from the south northwards. The strait of the Dardanelles is bounded by undisturbed pleistocene strata forty feet thick, through which, to all appearance, the present passage has been quietly cut.
That Olympus and Ossa were torn asunder and the waters of the Thessalian basin poured forth, is a very ancient notion, and an often cited “confirmation” of Deucalion’s flood. It has not yet ceased to be in vogue, apparently because those who entertain it are not aware that modern geological investigation has conclusively proved that the gorge of the Peneus is as typical an example of a valley of erosion as any to be seen in Auvergne or in Colorado.183
Thus, in the immediate vicinity of the vast expanse of country which can be proved to have been untouched by any catastrophe before, during, and since the “glacial epoch,” lie the great areas of the Ægean and the Red Sea, in which, during or since the glacial epoch, changes of the relative positions of land and sea have taken place, in comparison with which the submergence of Moel Tryfaen, with all Wales and Scotland to boot, does not come to much.
What, then, is the relevancy of talk about the “glacial epoch” to the question of the historical veracity of the narrator of the story of the Noachian deluge? So far as my knowledge goes, there is not a particle of evidence that destructive inundations were more common over the general surface of the earth in the glacial epoch than they have been before or since. No doubt the fringe of an ice-covered region must be always liable to them; but, if we examine the records of such catastrophes in historical times, those produced in the deltas of great rivers, or in lowlands like Holland, by sudden floods, combined with gales of wind or with unusual tides, far excel all others.
With respect to such inundations as are the consequences of earthquakes, and other slight movements of the crust of the earth, I have never heard of anything to show that they were more frequent and severer in the quaternary or tertiary epochs than they are now. In the discussion of these, as of all other geological problems, the appeal to needless catastrophes is born of that impatience of the slow and painful search after sufficient causes in the ordinary course of nature which is a temptation to all, though only energetic ignorance nowadays completely succumbs to it.
Postscript.
My best thanks are due to Mr. Gladstone for his courteous withdrawal of one of the statements to which I have thought it needful to take exception. The familiarity with controversy, to which Mr. Gladstone alludes, will have accustomed him to the misadventures which arise when, as sometimes will happen in the heat of fence, the buttons come off the foils. I trust that any scratch which he may have received will heal as quickly as my own flesh wounds have done.
A contribution to the last number of this Review of a different order would be left unnoticed, were it not that my silence would convert me into an accessory to misrepresentations of a very grave character. However, I shall restrict myself to the barest possible statement of facts, leaving my readers to draw their own conclusions.
In an article entitled “A Great Lesson,” published in this Review for September 1887:
(1) The Duke of Argyll says the “overthrow of Darwin’s speculations” (p. 301) concerning the origin of coral reefs, which he fancied had taken place, had been received by men of science “with a grudging silence as far as public discussion is concerned” (p. 301).
The truth is that, as every one acquainted with the literature of the subject was well aware, the views supposed to have effected this overthrow had been fully and publicly discussed by Dana in the United States; by Geikie, Green, and Prestwich in this country; by Lapparent in France; and by Credner in Germany.
(2) The Duke of Argyll says “that no serious reply has ever been attempted” (p. 305).
The truth is that the highest living authority on the subject, Professor Dana, published a most weighty reply, two years before the Duke of Argyll committed himself to this statement.
(3) The Duke of Argyll uses the preceding products of defective knowledge, multiplied by excessive imagination, to illustrate the manner in which “certain accepted opinions” established “a sort of Reign of Terror in their own behalf” (p. 307).
The truth is that no plea, except that of total ignorance of the literature of the subject, can excuse the errors cited, and that the “Reign of Terror” is a purely subjective phenomenon.
(4) The letter in Nature for the 17th of November 1887, to which I am referred, contains neither substantiation, nor retractation, of statements 1 and 2. Nevertheless, it repeats number 3. The Duke of Argyll says of his article that it “has done what I intended it to do. It has called wide attention to the influence of mere authority in establishing erroneous theories and in retarding the progress of scientific truth.”
(5) The Duke of Argyll illustrates the influence of his fictitious “Reign of Terror” by the statement that Mr. John Murray “was strongly advised against the publication of his views in derogation of Darwin’s long-accepted theory of the coral islands, and was actually induced to delay it for two years” (p. 307). And in Nature for the 17th November 1887, the Duke of Argyll states that he has seen a letter from Sir Wyville Thomson in which he “urged and almost insisted that Mr. Murray should withdraw the reading of his papers on the subject from the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This was in February 1877.” The next paragraph, however, contains the confession: “No special reason was assigned.” The Duke of Argyll proceeds to give a speculative opinion that “Sir Wyville dreaded some injury to the scientific reputation of the body of which he was the chief.” Truly, a very probable supposition; but as Sir Wyville Thomson’s tendencies were notoriously anti-Darwinian, it does not appear to me to lend the slightest justification to the Duke of Argyll’s insinuation that the Darwinian “terror” influenced him. However, the question was finally set at rest by a letter which appeared in Nature (29th of December 1887), in which the writer says that:
talking with Sir Wyville about “Murray’s new theory,” I asked what objection he had to its being brought before the public? The answer simply was: he considered that the grounds of the theory had not, as yet, been sufficiently investigated or sufficiently corroborated, and that therefore any immature, dogmatic publication of it would do less than little service either to science or to the author of the paper.
Sir Wyville Thomson was an intimate friend of mine, and I am glad to have been afforded one more opportunity of clearing his character from the aspersions which have been so recklessly cast upon his good sense and his scientific honour.
(6) As to the “overthrow” of Darwin’s theory, which, according to the Duke of Argyll, was patent to every unprejudiced person four years ago, I have recently become acquainted with a work, in which a really competent authority,184 thoroughly acquainted with all the new lights which have been thrown upon the subject during the last ten years, pronounces the judgment; firstly, that some of the facts brought forward by Messrs. Murray and Guppy against Darwin’s theory are not facts; secondly, that the others are reconcilable with Darwin’s theory; and, thirdly, that the theories of Messrs. Murray and Guppy “are contradicted by a series of important facts” (p. 13).
Perhaps I had better draw attention to the circumstance that Dr. Langenbeck writes under shelter of the guns of the fortress of Strassburg; and may therefore be presumed to be unaffected by those dreams of a “Reign of Terror” which seem to disturb the peace of some of us in these islands (April 1891).
Notes
1 With a few exceptions, which are duly noted when they amount to more than verbal corrections.
2 Declaration on the Truth of Holy Scripture. The Times, 18th December 1891.
3 Declaration, Article 10.
4 Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi ecclesiæ Catholicæ me commoveret auctoritas.—Contra Epistolam Manichæi, cap. v.
5 I employ the words “Supernature” and “Supernatural” in their popular senses. For myself, I am bound to say that the term “Nature” covers the totality of that which is. The world of psychical phenomena appears to me to be as much part of “Nature” as the world of physical phenomena; and I am unable to perceive any justification for cutting the Universe into two halves, one natural and one supernatural.
6 The general reader will find an admirably clear and concise statement of the evidence in this case, in Professor Flower’s recently published work The Horse: a Study in Natural History.
7 “The School Boards: What they can do and what they may do,” 1870. Critiques and Addresses, p. 51.
8 De Solido intra Solidum, p. 5.—“Dato corpore certâ figurâ prædito et juxta leges naturæ producto, in ipso corpore argumenta invenire locum et modum productionis detegentia.”
9 “Corpora sibi invicem omnino similia simili etiam modo producta sunt.”
10 [Sir J. D. Hooker.]
11 The Nineteenth Century.
12 Earlier, if more recent announcements are correct.
13 It may be objected that I have not put the case fairly, inasmuch as the solitary insect’s wing which was discovered twelve months ago in Silurian rocks, and which is, at present, the sole evidence of insects older than the Devonian epoch, came from strata of Middle Silurian age, and is therefore older than the scorpions which, within the last two years, have been found in Upper Silurian strata in Sweden, Britain, and the United States. But no one who comprehends the nature of the evidence afforded by fossil remains would venture to say that the non-discovery of scorpions in the Middle Silurian strata, up to this time, affords any more ground for supposing that they did not exist, than the non-discovery of flying insects in the Upper Silurian strata, up to this time, throws any doubt on the certainty that they existed, which is derived from the occurrence of the wing in the Middle Silurian. In fact, I have stretched a point in admitting that these fossils afford a colourable pretext for the assumption that the land and air-population were of contemporaneous origin.
14 The Nineteenth Century, 1886.
15 Both dolphins and dugongs occur in the Red Sea, porpoises and dolphins in the Mediterranean; so that the “Mosaic writer” may well have been acquainted with them.
16 I said nothing about “the greater number of schools of Greek philosophy,” as Mr. Gladstone implies that I did, but expressly spoke of the “founders of Greek philosophy.”
17 See Heinze, Die Lehre vom Logos, p. 9 et seq.
18 Reprinted in Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews, 1870.
19 “Ancient,” doubtless, but his antiquity must not be exaggerated. For example, there is no proof that the “Mosaic” cosmogony was known to the Israelites of Solomon’s time.
20 When Jeremiah (iv. 23) says, “I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was waste and void,” he certainly does not mean to imply that the form of the earth was less definite, or its substance less solid, than before.
21 In looking through the delightful volume recently published by the Astronomer Royal for Ireland, a day or two ago, I find the following remarks on the nebular hypothesis, which I should have been glad to quote in my text if I had known them sooner:—
“Nor can it be ever more than a speculation; it cannot be established by observation, nor can it be proved by calculation. It is merely a conjecture, more or less plausible, but perhaps, in some degree, necessarily true, if our present laws of heat, as we understand them, admit of the extreme application here required, and if the present order of things has reigned for sufficient time without the intervention of any influence at present known to us” (The Story of the Heavens, p. 506).
Would any prudent advocate base a plea, either for or against revelation, upon the coincidence, or want of coincidence, of the declarations of the latter with the requirements of an hypothesis thus guardedly dealt with by an astronomical expert?
22 Lectures on Evolution delivered in New York (American Addresses).
23 Reuss, L’Histoire Sainte et la Loi, vol. i. p. 275.
24 For the sense of the term “Elohim,” see p. 141.
25 Perhaps even hippopotamuses and otters!
26 Even the most sturdy believers in the popular theory that the proper or titular names attached to the books of the Bible are those of their authors will hardly be prepared to maintain that Jephthah, Gideon, and their colleagues wrote the book of Judges. Nor is it easily admissible that Samuel wrote the two books which pass under his name, one of which deals entirely with events which took place after his death. In fact, no one knows who wrote either Judges or Samuel, nor when, within the range of 100 years, their present form was given to these books.
27 My citations are taken from the Revised Version, but for Lord and God I have substituted Jahveh and Elohim.
28 I need hardly say that I depend upon authoritative Biblical critics, whenever a question of interpretation of the text arises. As Reuss appears to me to be one of the most learned, acute, and fair-minded of those whose works I have studied, I have made most use of the commentary and dissertations in his splendid French edition of the Bible. But I have also had recourse to the works of Dillman, Kalisch, Kuenen, Thenius, Tuch, and others, in cases in which another opinion seemed desirable.
29 See “Divination,” by Hazoral, Journal of Anthropology, Bombay, vol. i. No. 1.
30 See, for example, the message of Jephthah to the King of the Ammonites: “So now Jahveh, the Elohim of Israel, hath dispossessed the Amorites from before his people Israel, and shouldest thou possess them? Wilt not thou possess that which Chemosh, thy Elohim, giveth thee to possess?” (Jud. xi. 23, 24). For Jephthah, Chemosh is obviously as real a personage as Jahveh.
31 For example: “My oblation, my food for my offerings made by fire, of a sweet savour to me, shall ye observe to offer unto me in their due season” (Num. xxviii. 2).
32 In 2 Samuel xv. 27 David says to Zadok the priest, “Art thou not a seer?” and Gad is called David’s seer.
33 This would at first appear to be inconsistent with the use of the word “prophetess” for Deborah. But it does not follow because the writer of Judges applies the name to Deborah that it was used in her day.
34 Samuel tells the cook, “Bring the portion which I gave thee, of which I said to thee, Set it by thee.” It was therefore Samuel’s to give. “And the cook took up the thigh (or shoulder) and that which was upon it and set it before Saul.” But, in the Levitical regulations, it is the thigh (or shoulder) which becomes the priest’s own property. “And the right thigh (or shoulder) shall ye give unto the priest for an heave-offering,” which is given along with the wave breast “unto Aaron the priest and unto his sons as a due for ever from the children of Israel” (Lev. vii. 31-34). Reuss writes on this passage: “La cuisse n’est point agitée, mais simplement prelevée sur ce que les convives mangeront.”
35 See, for example, Elkanah’s sacrifice, 1 Sam. i. 3-9.
36 The ghost was not supposed to be capable of devouring the gross material substance of the offering; but his vaporous body appropriated the smoke of the burnt sacrifice, the visible and odorous exhalations of other offerings. The blood of the victim was particularly useful because it was thought to be the special seat of its soul or life. A West African negro replied to an European sceptic: “Of course, the spirit cannot eat corporeal food, but he extracts its spiritual part, and, as we see, leaves the material part behind” (Lippert, Seelencult, p. 16).
37 It is further well worth consideration whether indications of former ancestor-worship are not to be found in the singular weight attached to the veneration of parents in the fourth commandment. It is the only positive commandment, in addition to those respecting the Deity and that concerning the Sabbath, and the penalties for infringing it were of the same character. In China, a corresponding reverence for parents is part and parcel of ancestor-worship; so in ancient Rome and in Greece (where parents were even called δεύτεροι καὶ ἐπίγεοι θεοί). The fifth commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between ancestor-worship and monotheism. The larger hereditary share allotted by Israelitic law to the eldest son reminds one of the privileges attached to primogeniture in ancient Rome, which were closely connected with ancestor-worship. There is a good deal to be said in favour of the speculation that the ark of the covenant may have been a relic of ancestor-worship; but that topic is too large to be dealt with incidentally in this place.
38 “The Scientific Aspects of Positivism,” Fortnightly Review, 1869, republished in Lay Sermons.
39 Œuvres de Bossuet, ed. 1808, t. xxxv. p. 282.
40 I should like further to add the expression of my indebtedness to two works by Herr Julius Lippert, Der Seelencult in seinen Beziehungen zur alt-hebraischen Religion, and Die Religionen der europäischen Culturvölker, both published in 1881. I have found them full of valuable suggestions.
41 See among others the remarkable work of Fustel de Coulanges, La cité antique, in which the social importance of the old Roman ancestor-worship is brought out with great clearness.
42 Supposed to be “the finer or more aeriform part of the body,” standing in “the same relation to the body as the perfume and the more essential qualities of a flower do to the more solid substances” (Mariner, vol. ii. p. 127).
43 A kind of “clients” in the Roman sense.
44 It is worthy of remark that δαίμων among the Greeks, and Deus among the Romans, had the same wide signification. The dii manes were ghosts of ancestors = Atuas of the family.
45 Voyages aux îles du Grand Ocean, t. i. p. 482.
46 Te Ika a Maui: New Zealand and its Inhabitants, p. 72.
47 Compare: “And Samuel said unto Saul, Why hast thou disquieted me?” (1 Sam. xxviii. 15).
48 Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, p. 238.
49 See Lippert’s excellent remarks on this subject, Der Seelencult, p. 89.
50 Sciography has the authority of Cudworth, Intellectual System, vol. ii. p. 836. Sciomancy (σκιομαντεία), which, in the sense of divination by ghosts, may be found in Bailey’s Dictionary (1751), also furnishes a precedent for my coinage.
51 “Kami” is used in the sense of Elohim; and is also, like our word “Lord,” employed as a title of respect among men, as indeed Elohim was.
52 [The Assyrians thus raised Assur to a position of pre-eminence.]
53 I refer those who wish to know the reasons which lead me to take up this position to the works of Reuss and Wellhausen, [and especially to Stade’s Geschichte des Volkes Israel.]
54 Bunsen, Egypt’s Place, vol. v. p. 129, note.
55 See Birch, in Egypt’s Place, vol. v.; and Brugsch, History of Egypt.
56 Even by Graetz, who, though a fair enough historian, cannot be accused of any desire to over-estimate the importance of Egyptian influence upon his people.
57 Graetz, Geschichte der Juden, Bd. i. p. 370.
58 See the careful analysis of the work of the Alexandrian philosopher and theologian (who, it should be remembered, was a most devout Jew, held in the highest esteem by his countrymen) in Siegfried’s Philo von Alexandrien, 1875. [Also Dr. J. Drummond’s Philo Judæus, 1888.]
59 I am not unaware of the existence of many and widely divergent sects and schools among the Jews at all periods of their history, since the dispersion. But I imagine that orthodox Judaism is now pretty much what it was in Philo’s time; while Peter and Paul, if they could return to life, would certainly have to learn the catechism of either the Roman, Greek, or Anglican Churches, if they desired to be considered orthodox Christians.
60 Dante’s description of Lucifer engaged in the eternal mastication of Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot—
“Da ogni bocca dirompea co’ denti
Un peccatore, a guisa di maciulla,
Si che tre ne facea così dolenti.
A quel dinanzi il mordere era nulla,
Verso ’l graffiar, chè tal volta la schiena
Rimanea della pelle tutta brulla”—
is quite in harmony with the Pisan picture and perfectly Polynesian in conception.
61 See the famous Collection of Papers, published by Clarke in 1717. Leibnitz says: “’Tis also a supernatural thing that bodies should attract one another at a distance without any intermediate means.” And Clarke, on behalf of Newton, caps this as follows: “That one body should attract another without any intermediate means is, indeed, not a miracle, but a contradiction; for ’tis supposing something to act where it is not.”
62 I may cite in support of this obvious conclusion of sound reasoning, two authorities who will certainly not be regarded lightly by Mr. Lilly. These are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The former declares that “Fate” is only an ill-chosen name for Providence.
“Prorsus divina providentia regna constituuntur humana. Quæ si propterea quisquam fato tribuit, quia ipsam Dei voluntatem vel potestatem fati nomine appellat, sententiam teneat, linguam corrigat” (Augustinus De Civitate Dei, V. c. i.)
The other great doctor of the Catholic Church, “Divus Thomas,” as Suarez calls him, whose marvellous grasp and subtlety of intellect seem to me to be almost without a parallel, puts the whole case into a nutshell, when he says that the ground for doing a thing in the mind of the doer is as it were the pre-existence of the thing done:
“Ratio autem alicujus fiendi in mente actoris existens est quædam præ-existentia rei fiendæ in eo” (Summa, Qu. xxiii. Art. i.)
If this is not enough, I may further ask what “Materialist” has ever given a better statement of the case for determinism, on theistic grounds, than is to be found in the following passage of the Summa, Qu. xiv. Art. xiii.
“Omnia quæ sunt in tempore, sunt Deo ab æterno præsentia, non solum ea ex ratione quâ habet rationes rerum apud se presentes, ut quidam dicunt, sed quia ejus intuitus fertur ab æterno supra omnia, prout sunt in sua præsentialitate. Unde manifestum est quod contingentia infallibiliter a Deo cognoscuntur, in quantum subduntur divino conspectui secundum suam præsentialitatem; et tamen sunt futura contingentia, suis causis proximis comparata.”
[As I have not said that Thomas Aquinas is professedly a determinist, I do not see the bearing of citations from him which may be more or less inconsistent with the foregoing.]
63 There is no exaggeration in this brief and summary view of the Catholic cosmos. But it would be unfair to leave it to be supposed that the Reformation made any essential alteration, except perhaps for the worse, in that cosmology which called itself “Christian.” The protagonist of the Reformation, from whom the whole of the Evangelical sects are lineally descended, states the case with that plainness of speech, not to say brutality, which characterised him. Luther says that man is a beast of burden who only moves as his rider orders; sometimes God rides him, and sometimes Satan. “Sic voluntas humana in medio posita est, ceu jumentum; si insederit Deus, vult et vadit, quo vult Deus.... Si insederit Satan, vult et vadit, quo vult Satan; nec est in ejus arbitrio ad utrum sessorem currere, aut eum quærere, sed ipsi sessores certant ob ipsum obtinendum et possidendum” (De Servo Arbitrio, M. Lutheri Opera, ed. 1546, t. ii. p. 468). One may hear substantially the same doctrine preached in the parks and at street-corners by zealous volunteer missionaries of Evangelicism, any Sunday, in modern London. Why these doctrines, which are conspicuous by their absence in the four Gospels, should arrogate to themselves the title of Evangelical, in contradistinction to Catholic, Christianity, may well perplex the impartial inquirer, who, if he were obliged to choose between the two, might naturally prefer that which leaves the poor beast of burden a little freedom of choice.
64 I say “so-called” not by way of offence, but as a protest against the monstrous assumption that Catholic Christianity is explicitly or implicitly contained in any trustworthy record of the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
65 It may be desirable to observe that, in modern times, the term “Realism” has acquired a signification wholly different from that which attached to it in the middle ages. We commonly use it as the contrary of Idealism. The Idealist holds that the phenomenal world has only a subjective existence, the Realist that it has an objective existence. I am not aware that any mediæval philosopher was an Idealist in the sense in which we apply the term to Berkeley. In fact, the cardinal defect of their speculations lies in their oversight of the considerations which lead to Idealism. If many of them regarded the material world as a negation, it was an active negation; not zero, but a minus quantity.
66 At any rate a catastrophe greater than the flood, which, as I observe with interest, is as calmly assumed by the preacher to be an historical event as if science had never had a word to say on that subject!
67 “Les formes des anciens ou Entéléchies ne sont autre chose que les forces” (Leibnitz, Lettre au Père Bouvet, 1697).
68 Nineteenth Century, March 1887.
69 The Duke of Argyll speaks of the recent date of the demonstration of the fallacy of the doctrine in question. “Recent” is a relative term, but I may mention that the question is fully discussed in my book on “Hume”; which, if I may believe my publishers, has been read by a good many people since it appeared in 1879. Moreover, I observe, from a note at page 89 of The Reign of Law, a work to which I shall have occasion to advert by and by, that the Duke of Argyll draws attention to the circumstance that, so long ago as 1866, the views which I hold on this subject were well known. The Duke, in fact, writing about this time, says, after quoting a phrase of mine: “The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence.” In science we think that a teacher who ignores views which have been discussed coram populo for twenty years, is hardly up to the mark.
70 See also vol. i. p. 460. In the ninth edition (1853), published twenty-three years after the first, Lyell deprives even the most careless reader of any excuse for misunderstanding him: “So in regard to subterranean movements, the theory of the perpetual uniformity of the force which they exert on the earth-crust is quite consistent with the admission of their alternate development and suspension for indefinite periods within limited geographical areas” (p. 187).
71 A great many years ago (Presidential Address to the Geological Society, 1869) I ventured to indicate that which seemed to me to be the weak point, not in the fundamental principles of uniformitarianism, but in uniformitarianism as taught by Lyell. It lay, to my mind, in the refusal by Hutton, and in a less degree by Lyell, to look beyond the limits of the time recorded by the stratified rocks. I said: “This attempt to limit, at a particular point, the progress of inductive and deductive reasoning from the things which are to the things which were—this faithlessness to its own logic, seems to me to have cost uniformitarianism the place as the permanent form of geological speculation which it might otherwise have held” (Lay Sermons, p. 260). The context shows that “uniformitarianism” here means that doctrine, as limited in application by Hutton and Lyell, and that what I mean by “evolutionism” is consistent and thoroughgoing uniformitarianism.
72 Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. i. p. 670. New edition, 1847.
73 At Glasgow in 1856.
74 Optics, query 31.
75 The author recognises this in his Explanations.
76 “The Advance of Science.” Three sermons preached in Manchester Cathedral on Sunday, September 4, 1887, during the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, by the Bishop of Carlisle, the Bishop of Bedford, and the Bishop of Manchester.
77 American Journal of Science, 1885, p. 190.
78 Professor Geikie, however, though a strong, is a fair and candid advocate. He says of Darwin’s theory, “That it may be possibly true, in some instances, may be readily granted.” For Professor Geikie, then, it is not yet overthrown—still less a dream.
79 I find, moreover, that I specially warned my readers against hasty judgment. After stating the facts of observation, I add, “I have, hitherto, said nothing about their meaning, as, in an inquiry so difficult and fraught with interest as this, it seems to me to be in the highest degree important to keep the questions of fact and the questions of interpretation well apart” (p. 210).
80 See the Official Report of the Church Congress held at Manchester, October 1888, pp. 253, 254.
81 [In this place and in the eleventh essay, there are references to the late Archbishop of York which are of no importance to my main argument, and which I have expunged because I desire to obliterate the traces of a temporary misunderstanding with a man of rare ability, candour, and wit, for whom I entertained a great liking and no less respect. I rejoice to think now of the (then) Bishop’s cordial hail the first time we met after our little skirmish, “Well, is it to be peace or war?” I replied, “A little of both.” But there was only peace when we parted, and ever after.]
82 Dr. Wace tells us, “It may be asked how far we can rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord’s teaching on these subjects.” And he seems to think the question appropriately answered by the assertion that it “ought to be regarded as settled by M. Renan’s practical surrender of the adverse case.” I thought I knew M. Renan’s works pretty well, but I have contrived to miss this “practical” (I wish Dr. Wace had defined the scope of that useful adjective) surrender. However, as Dr. Wace can find no difficulty in pointing out the passage of M. Renan’s writings, by which he feels justified in making his statement, I shall wait for further enlightenment, contenting myself, for the present, with remarking that if M. Renan were to retract and do penance in Notre-Dame to-morrow for any contributions to Biblical criticism that may be specially his property, the main results of that criticism, as they are set forth in the works of Strauss, Baur, Reuss, and Volkmar, for example, would not be sensibly affected.
83 [See De Gobineau, Les Religions et les Philosophies dans l’Asie Centrale; and the recently published work of Mr. E. G. Browne, The Episode of the Bab.]
84 Here, as always, the revised version is cited.
85 Does any one really mean to say that there is any internal or external criterion by which the reader of a biblical statement, in which scientific matter is contained, is enabled to judge whether it is to be taken au sérieux or not? Is the account of the Deluge, accepted as true in the New Testament, less precise and specific than that of the call of Abraham, also accepted as true therein? By what mark does the story of the feeding with manna in the wilderness, which involves some very curious scientific problems, show that it is meant merely for edification, while the story of the inscription of the Law on stone by the hand of Jahveh is literally true? If the story of the Fall is not the true record of an historical occurrence, what becomes of Pauline theology? Yet the story of the Fall as directly conflicts with probability, and is as devoid of trustworthy evidence, as that of the Creation or that of the Deluge, with which it forms an harmoniously legendary series.
86 See, for an admirable discussion of the whole subject, Dr. Abbott’s article on the Gospels in the Encyclopædia Britannica; and the remarkable monograph by Professor Volkmar, Jesus Nazarenus und die erste christliche Zeit (1882). Whether we agree with the conclusions of these writers or not, the method of critical investigation which they adopt is unimpeachable.
87 Notwithstanding the hard words shot at me from behind the hedge of anonymity by a writer in a recent number of the Quarterly Review, I repeat, without the slightest fear of refutation, that the four Gospels, as they have come to us, are the work of unknown writers.
88 Their arguments, in the long run, are always reducible to one form. Otherwise trustworthy witnesses affirm that such and such events took place. These events are inexplicable, except the agency of “spirits” is admitted. Therefore “spirits” were the cause of the phenomena.
And the heads of the reply are always the same. Remember Goethe’s aphorism: “Alles factische ist schon Theorie.” Trustworthy witnesses are constantly deceived, or deceive themselves, in their interpretation of sensible phenomena. No one can prove that the sensible phenomena, in these cases, could be caused only by the agency of spirits: and there is abundant ground for believing that they may be produced in other ways. Therefore, the utmost that can be reasonably asked for, on the evidence as it stands, is suspension of judgment. And, on the necessity for even that suspension, reasonable men may differ, according to their views of probability.
89 Yet I must somehow have laid hold of the pith of the matter, for, many years afterwards, when Dean Mansell’s Bampton lectures were published, it seemed to me I already knew all that this eminently agnostic thinker had to tell me.
90 Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Edit. Hartenstein, p. 256.
91 Report of the Church Congress, Manchester, 1888, p. 252.
92 Fortnightly Review, Jan. 1889.
93 My citations are made from Teulet’s Einhardi omnia quæ extant opera, Paris, 1840-1843, which contains a biography of the author, a history of the text, with translations into French, and many valuable annotations.
94 At present included in the Duchies of Hesse-Darmstadt and Baden.
95 This took place in the year 826 A.D. The relics were brought from Rome and deposited in the Church of St. Medardus at Soissons.
96 Now included in Western Switzerland.
97 Probably, according to Teulet, the present Sandhofer-fahrt, a little below the embouchure of the Neckar.
98 The present Michilstadt, thirty miles N.E. of Heidelberg.
99 In the Middle Ages one of the most favourite accusations against witches was that they committed just these enormities.
100 It is pretty clear that Eginhard had his doubts about the deacon, whose pledges he qualifies as sponsiones incertæ. But, to be sure, he wrote after events which fully justified scepticism.
101 The words are scrinia sine clave, which seems to mean “having no key.” But the circumstances forbid the idea of breaking open.
102 Eginhard speaks with lofty contempt of the “vana ac superstitiosa præsumptio” of the poor woman’s companions in trying to alleviate her sufferings with “herbs and frivolous incantations.” Vain enough, no doubt, but the “mulierculæ” might have returned the epithet “superstitious” with interest.
103 Of course there is nothing new in this argument; but it does not grow weaker by age. And the case of Eginhard is far more instructive than that of Augustine, because the former has so very frankly, though incidentally, revealed to us not only his own mental and moral habits, but those of the people about him.
104 See 1 Cor. xii. 10-28; 2 Cor. vi. 12; Rom. xv. 19.
105 A Journal or Historical Account of the Life, Travels, Sufferings, and Christian Experiences, &c., of George Fox. Ed. 1694, pp. 27, 28.
106 I may perhaps return to the question of the authorship of the Gospels. For the present I must content myself with warning my readers against any reliance upon Dr. Wace’s statements as to the results arrived at by modern criticism. They are as gravely as surprisingly erroneous.
107 The United States ought, perhaps, to be added, but I am not sure.
108 Imagine that all our chairs of Astronomy had been founded in the fourteenth century, and that their incumbents were bound to sign Ptolemaic articles. In that case, with every respect for the efforts of persons thus hampered to attain and expound the truth, I think men of common sense would go elsewhere to learn astronomy. Zeller’s Vorträge und Abhandlungen were published and came into my hands a quarter of a century ago. The writer’s rank, as a theologian to begin with, and subsequently as a historian of Greek philosophy, is of the highest. Among these essays are two—Das Urchristenthum and Die Tübinger historische Schule—which are likely to be of more use to those who wish to know the real state of the case than all that the official “apologists,” with their one eye on truth and the other on the tenets of their sect, have written. For the opinion of a scientific theologian about theologians of this stamp see pp. 225 and 227 of the Vorträge.
109 I suppose this is what Dr. Wace is thinking about when he says that I allege that there “is no visible escape” from the supposition of an Ur-Marcus (p. 367). That a “theologian of repute” should confound an indisputable fact with one of the modes of explaining that fact is not so singular as those who are unaccustomed to the ways of theologians might imagine.
110 Any examiner whose duty it has been to examine into a case of “copying” will be particularly well prepared to appreciate the force of the case stated in that most excellent little book, The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, by Dr. Abbott and Mr. Rushbrooke (Macmillan, 1884). To those who have not passed through such painful experiences I may recommend the brief discussion of the genuineness of the “Casket Letters” in my friend Mr. Skelton’s interesting book, Maitland of Lethington. The second edition of Holtzmann’s Lehrbuch, published in 1886, gives a remarkably fair and full account of the present results of criticism. At p. 366 he writes that the present burning question is whether the “relatively primitive narrative and the root of the other synoptic texts is contained in Matthew or in Mark. It is only on this point that properly-informed (sachkundige) critics differ,” and he decides in favour of Mark.
111 Holtzmann (Die synoptischen Evangelien, 1863, p. 75), following Ewald, argues that the “Source A” ( = the threefold tradition, more or less) contained something that answered to the “Sermon on the Plain” immediately after the words of our present Mark, “And he cometh into a house” (iii. 19). But what conceivable motive could “Mark” have for omitting it? Holtzmann has no doubt, however, that the “Sermon on the Mount” is a compilation, or, as he calls it in his recently-published Lehrbuch (p. 372), “an artificial mosaic work.”
112 See Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, Zweiter Theil, p. 384.
113 Spacious, because a young man could sit in it “on the right side” (xv. 5), and therefore with plenty of room to spare.
114 King Herod had not the least difficulty in supposing the resurrection of John the Baptist—“John, whom I beheaded, he is risen” (Mark vi. 16).
115 I am very sorry for the interpolated “in,” because citation ought to be accurate in small things as in great. But what difference it makes whether one “believes Jesus” or “believes in Jesus” much thought has not enabled me to discover. If you “believe him” you must believe him to be what he professed to be—that is, “believe in him;” and if you “believe in him” you must necessarily “believe him.”
116 True for Justin: but there is a school of theological critics, who more or less question the historical reality of Paul and the genuineness of even the four cardinal epistles.
117 See Dial. cum Tryphone, § 47 and § 35. It is to be understood that Justin does not arrange these categories in order, as I have done.
118 I guard myself against being supposed to affirm that even the four cardinal epistles of Paul may not have been seriously tampered with. See note 116, p. 429 above.
119 [Paul, in fact, is required to commit in Jerusalem, an act of the same character as that which he brands as “dissimulation” on the part of Peter in Antioch.]
120 All this was quite clearly pointed out by Ritschl nearly forty years ago. See Die Entstehung der alt-katholischen Kirche (1850), p. 108.
121 “If every one was baptized as soon as he acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah, the first Christians can have been aware of no other essential differences from the Jews.”—Zeller, Vorträge (1865), p. 26.
122 Dr. Harnack, in the lately-published second edition of his Dogmengeschichte, says (p. 39), “Jesus Christ brought forward no new doctrine;” and again (p. 65), “It is not difficult to set against every portion of the utterances of Jesus an observation which deprives him of originality.” See also Zusatz 4, on the same page.
[123] The substance of a paragraph which precedes this has been transferred to the Prologue.
124 “Let us maintain, before we have proved. This seeming paradox is the secret of happiness” (Dr. Newman: Tract 85, p. 85).
125 Dr. Newman, Essay on Development, p. 357.
126 It is by no means to be assumed that “spiritual” and “corporeal” are exact equivalents of “immaterial” and “material” in the minds of ancient speculators on these topics. The “spiritual body” of the risen dead (1 Cor. xv.) is not the “natural” “flesh and blood” body. Paul does not teach the resurrection of the body in the ordinary sense of the word “body”; a fact, often overlooked, but pregnant with many consequences.
127 Tertullian (Apolog. adv. Gentes, cap. xxiii.) thus challenges the Roman authorities: let them bring a possessed person into the presence of a Christian before their tribunal; and, if the demon does not confess himself to be such, on the order of the Christian, let the Christian be executed out of hand.
128 See the expression of orthodox opinion upon the “accommodation” subterfuge already cited above, p. 336.
129 I quote the first edition (1843). A second edition appeared in 1870. Tract 85 of the Tracts for the Times should be read with this Essay. If I were called upon to compile a Primer of “Infidelity,” I think I should save myself trouble by making a selection from these works, and from the Essay on Development by the same author.
130 Yet, when it suits his purpose, as in the Introduction to the Essay on Development, Dr. Newman can demand strict evidence in religious questions as sharply as any “infidel author”; and he can even profess to yield to its force (Essay on Miracles, 1870, note, p. 391).
131 Compare Tract 85, p. 110: “I am persuaded that were men but consistent who oppose the Church doctrines as being unscriptural, they would vindicate the Jews for rejecting the Gospel.”
132 According to Dr. Newman, “This prayer [that of Bishop Alexander, who begged God to ’take Arius away’] is said to have been offered about 3 P.M. on the Saturday; that same evening Arius was in the great square of Constantine, when he was suddenly seized with indisposition” (p. clxx). The “infidel” Gibbon seems to have dared to suggest that “an option between poison and miracle” is presented by this case; and, it must be admitted, that, if the Bishop had been within the reach of a modern police magistrate, things might have gone hardly with him. Modern “Infidels,” possessed of a slight knowledge of chemistry, are not unlikely, with no less audacity, to suggest an “option between fire-damp and miracle” in seeking for the cause of the fiery outburst at Jerusalem.
133 A writer in a spiritualist journal takes me roundly to task for venturing to doubt the historical and literal truth of the Gadarene story. The following passage in his letter is worth quotation: “Now to the materialistic and scientific mind, to the uninitiated in spiritual verities, certainly this story of the Gadarene or Gergesene swine presents insurmountable difficulties; it seems grotesque and nonsensical. To the experienced, trained, and cultivated Spiritualist this miracle is, as I am prepared to show, one of the most instructive, the most profoundly useful, and the most beneficent which Jesus ever wrought in the whole course of His pilgrimage of redemption on earth.” Just so. And the first page of this same journal presents the following advertisement, among others of the same kidney:—
“To Wealthy Spiritualists.—A Lady Medium of tried power wishes to meet with an elderly gentleman who would be willing to give her a comfortable home and maintenance in Exchange for her Spiritualistic services, as her guides consider her health is too delicate for public sittings: London preferred.—Address “Mary,” Office of Light.”
Are we going back to the days of the Judges, when wealthy Micah set up his private ephod, teraphim, and Levite?
134 Consider Tertullian’s “sister” (“hodie apud nos”), who conversed with angels, saw and heard mysteries, knew men’s thoughts, and prescribed medicine for their bodies (De Anima, cap. 9). Tertullian tells us that this woman saw the soul as corporeal, and described its colour and shape. The “infidel” will probably be unable to refrain from insulting the memory of the ecstatic saint by the remark, that Tertullian’s known views about the corporeality of the soul may have had something to do with the remarkable perceptive powers of the Montanist medium, in whose revelations of the spiritual world he took such profound interest.
135 See the New York World for Sunday, 21st October 1888; and the Report of the Seybert Commission, Philadelphia, 1887.
136 Dr. Newman’s observation that the miraculous multiplication of the pieces of the true cross (with which “the whole world is filled,” according to Cyril of Jerusalem; and of which some say there are enough extant to build a man-of-war) is no more wonderful than that of the loaves and fishes is one that I do not see my way to contradict. See Essay on Miracles, 2d ed. p. 163.
137 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, by J. H. Newman, D.D., pp. 7 and 8. (1878.)
138 Dr. Newman faces this question with his customary ability. “Now, I own, I am not at all solicitous to deny that this doctrine of an apostate Angel and his hosts was gained from Babylon: it might still be Divine nevertheless. God who made the prophet’s ass speak, and thereby instructed the prophet, might instruct His Church by means of heathen Babylon” (Tract 85, p. 83). There seems to be no end to the apologetic burden that Balaam’s ass can carry.
139 Nineteenth Century, May 1889 (p. 701).
140 I trust it may not be supposed that I undervalue M. Renan’s labours, or intended to speak slightingly of them.
141 To-day’s Times contains a report of a remarkable speech by Prince Bismarck, in which he tells the Reichstag that he has long given up investing in foreign stock, lest so doing should mislead his judgment in his transactions with foreign states. Does this declaration prove that the Chancellor accuses himself of being “sordid” and “selfish,” or does it not rather show that, even in dealing with himself, he remains the man of realities?
142 Bampton Lectures (1859), on “The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records stated anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times,” by the Rev. G. Rawlinson, M.A., pp. 5-6.
143 The Worth of the Old Testament, a Sermon preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral on the Second Sunday in Advent, 8th Dec. 1889, by H. P. Liddon, D.D., D.C.L., Canon and Chancellor of St. Paul’s. Second edition, revised and with a new preface, 1890.
144 St. Luke xvii. 32.
145 Ibid. 27.
146 St. Matt. xii. 40.
147 Bampton Lectures, 1859, pp. 50-51.
148 Commentary on Genesis, by the Bishop of Ely, p. 77.
149 Die Sintflut, 1876.
150 Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, ii. 784-791 (1877).
151 It is very doubtful if this means the region of the Armenian Ararat. More probably it designates some part either of the Kurdish range or of its south-eastern continuation.
152 So Reclus (Nouvelle Géographie Universelle, ix. 386), but I find the statement doubted by an authority of the first rank.
153 So far as I know, the narrative of the Creation is not now held to be true, in the sense in which I have defined historical truth, by any of the reconcilers. As for the attempts to stretch the Pentateuchal days into periods of thousands or millions of years, the verdict of the eminent biblical scholar, Dr. Riehm (Der biblische Schöpfungsbericht, 1881, pp. 15, 16), on such pranks of “Auslegungskunst” should be final. Why do the reconcilers take Goethe’s advice seriously?—
“Im Auslegen seyd frisch und munter!
Legt ihr’s nicht aus, so legt was unter.”
154 Thus Josephus (lib. ix.) says that his rival, Justus, persuaded the citizens of Tiberias to “set the villages that belonged to Gadara and Hippos on fire; which villages were situated on the borders of Tiberias and of the region of Scythopolis.”
155 It is said to have been destroyed by its captors.
156 “But as to the Grecian cities Gaza and Gadara and Hippos, he cut them off from the kingdom and added them to Syria.”—Josephus, Wars, II. vi. 3. See also Antiquities, XVII. xi. 4.
157 Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Christi, 1886-90.
158 If William the Conqueror, after fighting the battle of Hastings had marched to capture Chichester and then returned to assault Rye, being all the while anxious to reach London, his proceedings would not have been more eccentric than Mr. Gladstone must imagine those of Vespasian were.
159 See Reland, Palestina (1714), t. ii. p. 771. Also Robinson, Later Biblical Researches (1856), p. 87 note.
160 Nineteenth Century, February 1891, pp. 339-40.
161 Neither is it of any consequence whether the locality of the supposed miracle was Gadara, or Gerasa, or Gergesa. But I may say that I was well acquainted with Origen’s opinion respecting Gergesa. It is fully discussed and rejected in Riehm’s Handwörterbuch. In Kitto’s Biblical Cyclopædia (ii. p. 51) Professor Porter remarks that Origen merely “conjectures” that Gergesa was indicated; and he adds, “Now, in a question of this kind, conjectures cannot be admitted. We must implicitly follow the most ancient and creditable testimony, which clearly pronounces in favour of Γαδαρηνῶν. This reading is adopted by Tischendorf, Alford, and Tregelles.”
162 I may call attention, in passing, to the fact that this authority, at any rate, has no sort of doubt of the fact that Jewish Law did not rule in Gadara (indeed, under the head of “Gadara,” in the same work, it is expressly stated that the population of the place consisted “predominantly of heathens”), and that he scouts the notion that the Gadarene swineherds were Jews.
163 The evidence adduced, so far as post-exile times are concerned, appears to me insufficient to prove this assertion.
164 Even Leviticus xi. 26, cited without reference to the context, will not serve the purpose; because the swine is “cloven footed” (Lev. xi. 7).
165 1st Gospel: “And the devils besought him, saying, If Thou cast us out send us away into the herd of swine.” 2d Gospel: “They besought him, saying, Send us into the swine.” 3d Gospel: “They intreated him that he would give them leave to enter into them.”
166 See Marquardt, Römische Staatsverwaltung, Bd. III. p. 408.
167 Nineteenth Century, March 1889 (p. 362).
168 “The Value of Witness to the Miraculous.” Nineteenth Century, March 1889.
169 I cannot ask the Editor of this Review to reprint pages of an old article,—but the following passages sufficiently illustrate the extent and the character of the discrepancy between the facts of the case and Mr. Gladstone’s account of them:—
“Now, in the Gadarene affair, I do not think I am unreasonably sceptical if I say that the existence of demons who can be transferred from a man to a pig does thus contravene probability. Let me be perfectly candid. I admit I have no à priori objection to offer.... I declare, as plainly as I can, that I am unable to show cause why these transferable devils should not exist.”... (“Agnosticism,” Nineteenth Century, 1889, p. 177).
“What then do we know about the originator, or originators, of this groundwork—of that threefold tradition which all three witnesses (in Paley’s phrase) agree upon—that we should allow their mere statements to outweigh the counter arguments of humanity, of common sense, of exact science, and to imperil the respect which all would be glad to be able to render to their Master?” (ibid. p. 175).
I then go on through a couple of pages to discuss the value of the evidence of the synoptics on critical and historical grounds. Mr. Gladstone cites the essay from which these passages are taken, whence I suppose he has read it; though it may be that he shares the impatience of Cardinal Manning where my writings are concerned. Such impatience will account for, though it will not excuse, his sixth proposition.
170 The wicked, before being annihilated, returned to the world to disturb men; they entered into the body of unclean animals, “often that of a pig, as on the Sarcophagus of Seti I. in the Soane Museum.”—Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 88, Editorial Note.
171 In May 1849 the Tigris at Bagdad rose 22½ feet—5 feet above its usual rise—and nearly swept away the town. In 1831 a similarly exceptional flood did immense damage, destroying 7000 houses. See Loftus, Chaldea and Susiana, p. 7.
172 See the instructive chapter on Hasisadra’s flood in Suess, Das Antlitz der Erde, Abth. I. Only fifteen years ago a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal gave rise to a flood which covered 3000 square miles of the delta of the Ganges, 3 to 45 feet deep, destroying 100,000 people, innumerable cattle, houses, and trees. It broke inland, on the rising ground of Tipperah, and may have swept a vessel from the sea that far, though I do not know that it did.
173 See Cernik’s maps in Petermanns Mittheilungen, Ergänzungshefte 44 and 45, 1875-76.
174 I have not cited the dimensions given to the ship in most translations of the story, because there appears to be a doubt about them. Haupt (Keilinschriftliche Sindfluth-Bericht, p. 13) says that the figures are illegible.
175 It is probable that a slow movement of elevation of the land at one time contributed to the result—perhaps does so still.
176 At a comparatively recent period, the littoral margin of the Persian Gulf extended certainly 250 miles farther to the north-west than the present embouchure of the Shatt-el Arab. (Loftus, Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1853, p. 251.) The actual extent of the marine deposit inland cannot be defined, as it is covered by later fluviatile deposits.
177 Tiele (Babylonisch-Assyrische Geschichte, pp. 572-3) has some very just remarks on this aspect of the epos.
178 In the second volume of the History of the Euphrates Expedition, p. 637, Col. Chesney gives a very interesting account of the simple and rapid manner in which the people about Tekrit and in the marshes of Lemlum construct large barges, and make them watertight with bitumen. Doubtless the practice is extremely ancient; and as Colonel Chesney suggests, may possibly have furnished the conception of Noah’s ark. But it is one thing to build a barge 44 ft. long by 11 ft. wide and 4 ft. deep in the way described; and another to get a vessel of ten times the dimensions, so constructed, to hold together.
179 “Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine thätige Unwissenheit.” Maximen und Reflexionen, iii.
180 The well-known difficulties connected with this case have recently been carefully discussed by Mr. Bell in the Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow.
181 An instructive parallel is exhibited by the “Great Basin” of North America. See the remarkable memoir on “Lake Bonneville” by Mr. G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, just published.
182 It is true that earthquakes are common enough, but they are incompetent to produce such changes as those which have taken place.
183 See Teller, Geologische Beschreibung des sud-östlichen Thessalien: Denkschriften d. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, Bd. xl. p. 199.
184 Dr. Langenbeck, Die Theorien über die Entstehung der Korallen-Inseln und Korallen-Riffe (p. 13), 1890.