The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science. Sir John William Dawson
too much to say that all these prophets and reformers have been inspired of heaven; but scarcely too much to say that they have either received a message of God, or have been permitted to transmit to our world messages for weal or woe from powers without in subordination to him. Farther, we shall have reason in the sequel to see that in far back prehistoric times there must have been impulses given to mankind, and revelations made to them, as potent as those which have acted in later historic periods. In Holy Scripture the Word of God is represented as "enlightening every man; [3] " and with reference to our present subject we are told that "by faith we understand that the ages of the world were constituted by the Word of God, so that the visible things were not made of those which appear." [4] In other words, that the will of God has been active and operative as the sole cause throughout all ages of the world's creation and history, and that the visible universe is not a mere product of its own phenomena. We may call this faith, if we please, an intuition or instinct, a God-given gift, or a product of our own thought acting on evidence afforded by the outer world; but in any case it seems to be the sole possible solution of the mystery of origins.
These points being premised, we are in a position to inquire as to the teaching of our own Holy Scriptures, and in this inquiry we can easily take along with them all other revelations, pretended or true, that deal with our subject.
Max Müller, in his lectures on the Science of Religion, rejects the ordinary division into natural and revealed, and adopts a threefold grouping, corresponding to the great division of languages into Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. With some modification and explanation, this classification will serve well our present purpose. As to natural and revealed religions, if we regard our own as revealed, we must admit an element of revelation in all others as well. According to the Hebrew Scriptures revelation began in Eden, and was continued more or less in all successive ages up to the apostolic times. Consequently the earlier revelations of the antediluvian and postdiluvian times must have been the common property of all races, and must have been associated with whatever elements of natural religion they had. When, therefore, we call our religion distinctively a revealed one, we must admit that traces of the same revelation may be found in all others. On the other hand, when we characterize our religion as Hebrew or Semitic, we must bear in mind that in its earlier stages it was not so limited; but that, if as old as it professes to be, it must include a substratum common to it with the old religions of the Turanians and Aryans. Neglect of these very simple considerations often leads to great confusion in the minds both of Christians and unbelievers, as to the relation of Christianity to heathenism, and especially to the older and more primitive forms of heathenism.
The Turanian stock, of which the Mongolian peoples of Northern Asia may be taken as the type, includes also the American races, and the oldest historical populations of Western Asia and of Europe; and they are the peoples who, in their physical features and their art tendencies, most nearly resemble the prehistoric men of the caves and gravels. They largely consist of the populations which the Bible affiliates with Ham. They are remarkable for their permanent and stationary forms of civilization or barbarism, and for the languages least developed in grammatical structure. These people had and still have traditions of the creation and early history of man similar to those in the earlier Biblical books; but the connection of their religions with that of the Bible breaks off from the time of Abraham; and the earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all natural objects, and also that of worship of ancestors and heroes. The portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quichés of Central America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois, Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed down to us through the Semitic Assyrians from the ancient Chaldæo-turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates.
The Aryan races have been remarkable for their changeable and versatile character. Their religious ideas in the most primitive times appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Celts have all gone some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the more advanced nations of the Aryan, or in Scriptural language the Japhetic stock, have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago predicted, "dwell in the tents of Shem." No indigenous account of the genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. God has given to the Aryans no special revelations of his will, and they would have been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and philosophy, but for the advent among them of the prophets of "Jehovah the God of Shem."
It is to the Semitic race that God has been most liberal in his gift of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of superstition, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or almost alone, as adherents of a belief in one God the Creator. Their theology was added to from age to age by a succession of prophets, all working in one line of development, till it culminated in the appearance of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to expand itself over the other races. Among them it has undergone two remarkable phases of retrograde development—the one in Mohammedanism, which carries it back to a resemblance to its own earlier patriarchal stage, the other in Roman and Greek ecclesiasticism, which have taken it back to the Levitical system, along with a strong color of paganism. Still its original documents survive, and retain their hold on large portions of the more enlightened Aryan nations, while through their means these documents have entered on a new career of conquest among the Semites and Turanians. They are, however, it must be admitted, among the Aryan races of Europe, growing in a somewhat uncongenial soil; partly because of the materialistic organization of these races, and partly because of the abundant remains of heathenism which still linger among them; and it is possible that they may not realize their full triumphs over humanity till the Semitic races return to the position of Abraham, and erect again in the world the standard of monotheistic faith, under the auspices of a purified Christianity.
It follows from this hasty survey that it is the Semitic solution of the question of origins, as contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, that mainly concerns us; and in the first place we must consider the foundation and historical development of this solution, as many misconceptions prevail on these points. We may discuss these subjects under the heads of the Abrahamic Genesis and the Mosaic Genesis, and may in a subsequent chapter consider the results of these in the Genesis of the later Scripture writers.
THE ABRAHAMIC GENESIS.
It has been a favorite theory with some learned men that the earlier parts of the book of Genesis existed as ancient documents even in the time of Moses, and were incorporated by him in his work, and attempts have been made to separate, on various grounds, the older from the newer portions. Until lately, however, these attempts have been altogether conjectural and destitute of any positive basis of archæological fact. A new and interesting aspect has been given to them by the recent readings of the inscriptions on clay tablets found at Nineveh, and to which especial attention has been given by the late Mr. G. Smith, of the Archæological Department of the British Museum.
Assurbanipal, king of Assyria, one of the kings known to the Greeks by the name of Sardanapalus, reigned at Nineveh about B.C. 673. He was a grandson of the Biblical Sennacherib, and son of Esarhaddon, and it seems that he had inherited from his fathers a library of Chaldean and Assyrian literature, written not on perishable paper or parchment, but on tablets of clay, and containing much ancient lore of the nations inhabiting the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates. Assurbanipal, living when the Assyrian empire had attained to the acme of its greatness, had leisure