HISTORICAL. CHAPTER I. THE ORIGIN OF HISTORY. Perhaps no other subject of pure speculation has ever engrossed the thought of mankind so much as this: What is the origin and history of man, from his first appearance on earth unto the present day? Where and in what degree of culture did he first make himself known on earth; and in what manner did he arrive at the stage of culture which he now occupies? Has he fallen or ascended? Was he originally a man in direct communion with God, or a monkey stretching out its paws to reach that communion? In answer to these contradictory questions there arise the arguments of two parties, the one of which says: Man is nothing but an evolutionized creature of the common dust-speck that you see dancing in the sunbeam before your eye; and the other of which holds that Man is a being fallen from original God-imageness into his present state of sin and misery. Philosophically, we know that every theory or proposition advanced in regard to any subject finds its complement in a directly opposite proposition. Thus, for instance, no self-consciousness can be thought without its complement of a non-self-conscious matter. Or, to transfer the illustration to another purely mental science: the construction of a triangle or a square will always go hand in hand with that of a circle. In the physical world, again, we also have always, in the same way, two contradictory phenomena at every point of time: the full-grown planet of the earth and the new-born meteors, the nebulæ of the Orion and the Orion itself. Search back as far as you please into the geological history of the earth, and it makes no difference whether you take billions, millions, or thousands of years for your computation, you will always be historically compelled to stop at an historically given period, beyond which only a wild and disordered phantasy will pretend it possible to penetrate. May it not, therefore, appear most proper to sum up the two opposite views regarding the origin of man's existence on earth in this synthetical manner: We cannot possibly think a monad evolutionizing into a primitive man, without at the same time supplementing the thought by the conception of a complete, rational man, in the fullest possession of his divine possibilities; and history bears out this view. The earliest authentic record of our race represents Adam as the prototype of Jesus Christ, but surrounded by a race of men growing up as brutal as He was celestial; even as the divinely inspired Saviour appeared in the midst of a debased, sinful, earth-loving race of men, whom He came to teach the divine law of redemption and salvation through faith and love. The philosophers had taught that the soul of the self-conscious man would become ever-living by the death of the body; that the law of inspiration from the divine fountain was fulfilled by the evercontinuing living of the divinely inspired human being. But the divinely inspired God-Man taught the race how to attain the everlasting life of happiness and activity by a living faith and belief in God, and by loving God "with all thy heart, and soul, and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." Historically, no one can point out the original appearance of man upon the earth. The very nature of the case precludes the possibility of such an historical record. But it is very certain, both from philosophical reasonings and by the records of history, that, at least after the flood, man appeared in various parts of the globe at one and the same time approximately. In Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt, and Canaan there were men found in full communion with God; in other lands, as simply uninspired idolaters. The Bible traces out this duplicate of man's history very fully.2 In short, to comprehend man's existence on this planet, we must assume that he primarily existed not only in the duplicate form of male and female, but also 1 Plato, Phædo. Piazzi Smith, LL.D., Royal Astronomer of Scotland, the "Great Pyramid of Jeesah" (ed. 1877), on the inspired design and construction of the pyramid, 4,043 years ago. A miracle in stone. 2 Genesis, Chaps. X.-XX. |