Chapter XII (3)

“I do not regret it,” replied an old man sitting in the midst of the crowd, who had until that time maintained a profound silence. “Is it not better for a nation to be less rich and powerful than stained with so many crimes? It is now but thirty-eight years since Columbus founded the colony of San Domingo. This island then contained a million of inhabitants; to-day there scarcely remain forty thousand. But,” pursued the old man with a bitter smile, “they will not stop there. No; they will not confine their barbarous exploits to that miserable region. They are renewing in Peru the carnage they carried on in Mexico. It is necessary to have a great many places for a man to die--to pass a few moments, and then go and hide himself in the grave! I have already lived seventy-nine years, and yet it seems to me now that my left hand still rests on my cradle. I can scarcely believe that these white locks are scattered upon my head; for my life has sped like the fleeting dream of a single night that has passed. Yes, William,” continued the old man, “you look at me with astonishment, and your eyes, full of youthful fire, are fixed upon mine, in which the light has long been extinguished. Ah! well, you will very soon see it extinguished in your own, but not before you will have witnessed all their cruelties.”

“That is bad,” replied William. “But these Indians are stupid and indolent beyond all parallel;[232] they will neither work nor pay the taxes imposed on them.”

“And from whom do the Spaniards claim the right of reducing these people to a state of servitude,” exclaimed the old man indignantly, “and to treat them like beasts of burden whom they are privileged to exterminate with impunity, and carry off the gold their avarice covets, the dagger in one hand, the scourge in the other? They ensure them, they say, the happiness of knowing the Christian religion! How dare they presume to instruct these people in that Gospel of peace which commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to detach our hearts from the things of the world, and, leaving our offering before the altar, go and be reconciled with our enemy?”

“From that point of view your argument would seem just,” replied William; “but the fact is, if the Spaniards did not force these islanders to work them, the mines would remain unproductive, the fields uncultivated, and the colonies would perish.”

“You are mistaken,” replied the old man. “In acting as she does Spain destroys in her own womb the source from whence she would draw an immense revenue. If she had been satisfied to establish an honest and peaceable commerce with these countries, her industry, excited to the highest degree by the rich commodities of exchange, would have conferred an incalculable benefit on an entire people whom her blind cupidity has induced her to crush and destroy.

“Do you suppose these isolated negroes they buy at such enormous prices will ever be able to replace the native inhabitants who live and die in their own country? This strange and ferocious population will remain among the colonies, enemies always ready to revolt; a yoke of iron and blood will alone be sufficient to keep them in subjection. But let these masters tremble if ever the power falls into the hands of their slaves!”

MM. du Bellay and de Vaux listened to this conversation in silence, and the diversion was at first agreeable; but they were soon convinced that they were suddenly becoming again the objects of general attention.

“I tell you,” exclaimed one, “they are going to look for the cardinal and bring him back to court.”

“Well!” replied another, “I would like to see M. du Bellay in the place of the legate Campeggio.”

“Ah! and what have they done with him, then?” they all eagerly demanded.

“He was arrested at Dover, where he had gone to embark. He was dreadfully alarmed, believing they came to assassinate him. His baggage was searched, in order to find Wolsey’s treasures, with which he was entrusted, they said, for safe keeping.”

“And did they find them?” asked the Genoese merchant, eagerly leaning forward at the sound of the word treasure.

“It seems they did not find them,” was the reply.

“Hear what they say!” whispered young De Vaux in the ear of M. du Bellay.

“I presume they were in search of the legal documents, but they were too late. They have long ago arrived in Italy. Campeggio was careful enough to send them secretly by his _son_ Rudolph.[233] I often saw this young man in Rome, and heard him say his father had entrusted him with all his correspondence and despatches,[234] as he was not certain what fate Henry had in store for him.”

“You say,” replied young William, elevating his voice in order that M. du Bellay might hear him, “that the king has sent the Earl of Wiltshire to Rome to solicit his divorce. He had better make all these strangers leave who come into our country only to sow discord, and then gather the fruits of their villany.”

This speech, although spoken indirectly, was evidently intended for the two Frenchmen; but the Genoese merchant, always inclined to be suspicious, immediately applied it to himself.

“Master William,” he exclaimed, reddening with anger, “have you forgotten that for twenty years I have been a commercial friend of your father. And if he has made his fortune with our velvets and silks, to whom does he owe it, if not to those who, by their honesty and promptness in fulfilling their engagements, were the first cause of his success? Now, because you are able to live without work, you take on this insulting manner--very insulting indeed. However, I give you to understand that, if it suited me to do it, I could make as great a display of luxury and wealth as yourself, and can count on my dresser as many dishes and flagons of silver as you have; and if it suited me to remain at home, there is no necessity for me to travel any more on business.”

The merchant continued to boast of his fortune, and William began to explain that his remarks were by no means intended for him, when the passengers began to cry out: “Land! land! Here is Chelsea; we land at Chelsea.”

The rowers halted immediately, and the little boats sent from the shore came to take off the passengers who wished to land.

Almost all of them went; none remaining on the boat except the ambassador, the Genoese merchant, and two citizens whose retiring and prudent character could be read in the quiet, thoughtful expression of their faces. They gazed for a long time on the surrounding country; at last one of them hazarded the question:

“Do you know who owns that white house with the terraced garden extending down to the bank of the Thames?”

“That is the residence of Sir Thomas More, the new chancellor,” replied his companion methodically.

“Ah! it does not make much show. Do you know this new chancellor?”

“By my faith, no! However, I saw him the other day on the square at Westminster, as I was passing; the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were conducting him with great ceremony to the Star Chamber (at least that is what they told me). I stopped to look at him. There was an immense crowd filling all the square. In crossing it the Duke of Norfolk stopped, and, turning to the crowd before him, said the king had instructed him to publicly proclaim what great and important services Sir Thomas had rendered him in every position he had confided to his care, and it was on that account he esteemed him so highly, and had appointed him now to the highest position in the kingdom because of his virtues and the rare talents he possessed. Everybody listened and said nothing (because you know the last is always the best).” The citizen said this in a very low tone.

“More replied very well,” he continued. “He said that, while deeply grateful for his majesty’s goodness and favors, he felt no less deeply convinced that the king had rewarded him far beyond his merits; in all he had accomplished he had but done his duty, and he greatly feared now that he might not possess the ability necessary for acquitting himself of the duties of so high and important an office. And--a very singular thing (for they do not usually speak of their predecessors)--he declared that he could not rejoice in the honor conferred on him, as it recalled the name of the wise and honorable prelate whom he had superseded. On hearing that I supposed they would hiss; but not at all. He said everything so well, with so much sincerity, dignity, and firmness, that they applauded him with an indescribable enthusiasm. It seemed those who knew him were never satisfied with praising him. Nobody, they said, rendered justice so scrupulously as he; none were so wise, so disinterested; in fact, they never ended the recital of his perfections.”

“Ah!” said the other, in a voice scarcely audible, while he looked round to discover if any one could hear him, “we will see later if he performs all these wonderful things, and if any one will be able to get near him without paying even his doorkeeper, as was the case with the other.”

“Yes, we will see,” replied his companion. “None of these great lords are worth much--any amount of _promises_; but of _deeds_--nothing!”

“But this is not a great lord,” answered the citizen.

“Ah! well, it is all the same; as soon as they rise, they grow proud, and despise and scorn the people. You may believe if ever I obtain a patent of nobility, and become still richer than I am now, I will crush them beautifully; there will not be one who will dare contradict me. By my faith! it is a great pity I had not been born a count or a baron; I should have been so well up to all their impertinences and want of feeling.”

“It is not very difficult,” replied his companion; “you are, I think, sufficiently so now for the good of that poor youth who wants to marry your daughter. He will lose his senses, I am afraid, poor fellow.”

“What did you say, neighbor?” replied the citizen, feeling the blood mount to his face. “Do you think I will give my daughter to a wretch who has not a cent in the world--I who have held in my family the right of citizenship from time immemorial? My grandmother also told me we have had two aldermen of our name. All that counts, you see, Master Allicot; and if you wish to remain my friend, I advise you not to meddle yourself with the tattle of my wife and daughter on the subject of that little wretch they are putting it into her head to marry; because, in truth, the mother is as bad as the daughter. Ah! neighbor, these women, these women are the plagues of our lives! Don’t say any more to me about it. They will run me distracted; but they will make nothing by it, I swear it, neighbor. The silly jades! to dare speak to me of such a match! Hush! don’t say any more to me about it, neighbor; for it will drive me mad!”

The neighbor _did_ reply, however, because he had been commissioned to use his influence in softening the husband and father in favor of a young mechanic full of life and health, who had no other fault than that of belonging to a class less elevated than that of the proud citizen who rejected his humble supplications with scorn.

But the _dénouement_ of this embassy, and the termination of this romance of the warehouse, have been for ever lost to history; for M. du Bellay, seeing they were almost in sight of Asher, made them land him, and the two honorable citizens doubtless continued their journey and their conversation.

At Asher M. du Bellay found everything just as he expected. The physicians surrounded Wolsey’s bed, watching his slightest movement. The golden tablets of young Anne Boleyn were thrown open upon the coarse woollen bedspread that covered the sick man. Cromwell walked the floor with folded arms. He approached the bed from time to time, looked at Wolsey, whose closed eyes and labored breathing betokened nothing favorable, then at the golden tablets, then at the physicians around him. He seemed to say, “Is he going to die, and just when he might be so useful to me?”

On seeing M. du Bellay enter, his countenance lighted up; he ran on before him, and endeavored to arouse Wolsey from his stupor.

“My lord, the ambassador of France!” he cried in the ear of the dying man.

But he received no reply.

“It is singular,” said the doctors, “nothing can arouse him.” And they looked gravely at each other.

“He will not die! I tell you he will not die!” replied Cromwell, evincing the most impatient anxiety.

He approached the cardinal and shook his head.

“Crom--well,” murmured the sick man.

“Monsieur du Bellay!” shouted Cromwell a second time.

Wolsey’s eyes remained closed.

“Let him alone,” cried the physicians; “he must not be excited.”

“So I think,” said M. du Bellay. “You can tell him I have been here,” continued the ambassador, turning towards Cromwell, “but did not wish to disturb him.”

M. du Bellay then took his leave, and returned by the land route to London. He encountered, not far from Asher, a party of the cardinal’s old domestics, whom the king had sent to carry him several wagon-loads of furniture and other effects. At the head of this convoy rode Cavendish, one of the cardinal’s most faithful servants.

Seeing M. du Bellay, they collected around him, and hastily inquired about their master.

Du Bellay advised them to quicken their speed, and, taking leave, went on his way, thinking that the cardinal would not be restored to favor, and already arranging in his mind another course in which to direct his diplomatic steps for the future.

He was not mistaken: Wolsey escaped death, but only to find himself surrounded by misery and abandoned to despair.

TO BE CONTINUED.

PRIMITIVE CIVILIZATION.[235]

If our modern men of science would not travel out of their sphere, there would be no war between them and the church. In the name of the Catholic religion we invite them to push onward in the path of scientific discovery with the utmost energy and ardor of which they are capable. But if their discoveries are to have any bearing on the truths of the Christian revelation, we can accept nothing less than demonstration, and they must not credit science, as does Mr. Tyndall, with mere theories of speculative philosophy. With this reservation, we wish their labors all possible success. But if poor fallible reason--whose discoveries, after whole millenniums of toil, are little better than a record of the blunders of one generation corrected by the blunders of another; and, even on the supposition that they are all correct, are, by comparison with what is unknown, as a drop of water compared with the limitless ocean--ventures to deny the existence of the soul because it has no lens powerful enough to bring it within the cognizance of the senses, its conclusion is no longer scientific. The doctor has become a quack, the philosopher a fool. If the torch which the Creator has placed at the service of his creature, to help him to grope his way amidst the objects of sense, and to illuminate his faith, is to be flung in his face because it does not reveal the whole infinitude of the majesty of his beauty, we can only compassionate so childish a misuse of a noble gift. If natural philosophy is to rob the sensible creation of a motive and end, and to proclaim it to be merely the result of an unintelligent atomic attraction and evolution of forces, a more intelligent and a more logical philosophy, in harmony with the unquenchable instinct of immortality within the human soul, casts from it such pitiful trifling with indignation and a holy disdain. If, in short, the science of nature would dethrone nature’s Creator and God, we address to it the word which He to whom all true science leads addressed to the ocean he placed in the deep hollows of the earth: “Hitherto thou shalt come, and thou shalt go no farther: and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves.”

Physical science cannot contradict the divine revelation. No discovery hitherto made has done so; and until one such presents itself we are entitled to assume its impossibility as a philosophical axiom. For this reason we are of those who would give full rein to even the speculations of experimental philosophy, so long as they are confined strictly within the domain of secondary causes or natural law, and do not venture into a sphere of thought beyond the reach of experimental science, where they are immediately confronted with the dogmas of the faith.

We have never thought that the theory of the evolution of species must of necessity transgress that limit. It has been made to do so by _philosophuli_, if we may invent a name for them--speculative bigots, who are bent on extorting from natural phenomena any plausible support of the infidel prejudices of which they were previously possessed. A more intelligent observation of scientific facts would have saved them from a ridiculous extravagance which makes them resemble those afflicted creatures, whom we so often meet with in asylums for the insane, who suppose themselves to be God.

We must never lose sight of the fact that God can only communicate with his creature in such a way as he can understand. If he were to reveal himself to any of us as he is, we should die, unless he supplied us with a miraculous capacity for supporting the vision. If he had inspired the historian of those primitive ages to describe the astronomical phenomenon which happened in the time of Joshua in the exact language of physical science, what meaning would it have conveyed to people who did not know that the earth revolves around its own axis and around the sun? If it be objected, Why did not the Holy Spirit use language consistent with scientific truth, and leave it to be understood afterwards in the progress of science? we reply, Because it would have thwarted his own designs to have done so. The Bible is a book of instruction in truth out of the reach of human intelligence, not a book of natural science; and it appeals to the obedience of faith rather than to reason. The mental toil of scientific discovery was a part of the punishment inflicted on the original transgression. To anticipate the result of that toil by thousands of years would have been to contradict His own dispensation.

In the same manner the sublime record of the genesis of the illimitable universe which weaves its dance of light in space is told in a few sentences: The fiat of Him with whom one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, and the successive order of the creation--that is all. Time was not then, for it was the creation of time. Man can conceive no ideas independent of time, and so days are named; but it is evident that the word may stand for indeterminate periods of time. The creation of light was, it cannot be doubted, instantaneous. But that creation was a law--limitation, relation, succession--whose working was an evolution in successive orders or stages, over which presided the Creator, and still presides. “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work.” Each of these was a distinct creation, perfect in itself, not an evolution of species. The creation was progressive, but not in the sense of the creation of every one of its six cycles evolving out of the preceding one; for in that case either the lower would have disappeared or the evolution would be still in operation. The firmament did not develop out of light, nor the ocean and the dry land out of the firmament; nor were the fishes an evolution from the sea-weed, nor the birds from the trees and shrubs, nor the wild beasts from the reeds of the jungle, nor man from the lower animals. But they were all to be made before his creation who was the sum and end of all; and the atmosphere must be created before the birds, the ocean before the fishes, the dry land before vegetable life.

And not only was there never any evolution of species into other species, but the creation of every separate species was complete, so that there has never been an evolution of any species into a higher state or condition. There has never been any progress in that sense. Every species, including the human being, remains precisely as it issued from the hand of God, when it has not degenerated or disappeared. Indeed, the tendency of all living things around us is to degeneracy and decay. Whatever progress can be predicated of man is of his moral nature only, and of his knowledge, through the divine revelation. But even that is not a race progress, an evolution of species, but an individual one. If this be conceded--and we think it scarcely admits of dispute--we see no danger to the dogmas of the faith in allowing to the natural philosophers any length of ages they may claim for the creation of the home of man before he was called into being for whom it was destined.

Whatever period of time was covered by those cycles of creation, throughout them it may be said that he was being made. If all was for him and to end in him, it was in effect he who all along was being made. Yet the whole was only a preparatory creation. It was only his body in which all resulted. “A body thou hast prepared for me.” It was when “God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” that man was created. It was then he became “a living soul.”

The error of the physicists who reject revelation is threefold. They make the body the man; they thus assign to his body and the inner principle which animates it a simultaneous beginning and joint development, some of them going so far as to make the spirit itself, or soul, or whatever they call the animating principle, the spontaneous product of material forces. And, throwing back the beginning of the evolution process into untold ages, by comparison with which the life of an individual is a scarcely appreciable moment, they suppose the process to be still going on as it begun. All this obviously contradicts the direct statements of revelation. It is, indeed, shocking to mere human reason. The work of the natural creation ended with the sixth day. Up to that time, whether the periods were long or short, the work was going on. But it was complete when the body which had been prepared for him was animated with the spirit of life. After that there was no farther development. It is contrary to reason to suppose it. It is contrary to the whole analogy of nature. Not an instance can be adduced, throughout the entire creation, of one species developing into another--not an instance even of any species developing within itself into a higher order of being. But up to that period, of which it is thus written, _Igitur PERFECTI SUNT cœli et terra, et omnis ornatus eorum: COMPLEVITQUE Deus die septimo opus suum quod fecerat; et requievit die septimo ab uni verso opere quod patrarat_, we may admit, without risk of heterodoxy, any doctrine of evolution of which the physicists may give us a satisfactory evidence.

The physicists, in support of their irrational theory of evolution, maintain that the earliest developments of human consciousness were of the lowest order, and that man has ever since been gradually progressing towards a higher morality and loftier spheres of thought. In this able and interesting work Father Thébaud demonstrates, by an exhaustive induction from the history and literature of all the nations, that the history of mankind up to the coming of Christ, instead of a progress, was a continual retrogression.

In his introductory chapter he establishes, by proofs which should be conclusive to all minds unprepossessed by an arrogant perversity, that primitive man was in possession of a primitive revelation. In the morning twilight of the ages, as far back as we can see across the Flood, up to the very cherubim-guarded entrance to the seats of innocence from which the erring creature had been driven, he traces everywhere those rites and dogmas, in their elemental form, which, in their complete development and full significance, made known to us by the revelation of the fulness of time, are still of faith and observance amongst the sons of God from end to end of the habitable globe. This revelation did not go beyond monotheism, because the fallen immortal had to be prepared, through long ages of discipline, for the revelation of the triune nature of the Godhead, and of his restoration to the forfeited favor of his Father by the incarnation and atoning sacrifice of the Eternal Son. We do not remember to have met before with the ingenious hypothesis[236] that the configuration of the earth, consisting of an all-embracing ocean, in the midst of which vast continents are islands, evidences the design of the Creator to have been that “men should have intercourse of some kind with one another,” and that on the land.

“The oceans and rivers, instead of being primarily dividing
lines, intended to separate men from one another, had precisely
for their first object to become highways and common channels
of intercourse between the various nations of mankind.”

But our author considers that the social intercommunion to which the configuration of the earth was to administer was not to develop in the form of “an universal republic,” but that “men were to consent to exist in larger or smaller groups, each of them surrounded with well-defined limits determining numerous nationalities,” united in the bond of religious uniformity which he terms patriarchal Catholicity.

The design of the Creator of universal brotherhood amongst his creatures was not to be fulfilled before the lapse of ages, and throughout that dismal period it has the appearance of being perpetually thwarted by their perverseness. The memories of Paradise rapidly faded away amongst them. After what period of time we are not told, the sons of God committed a second infidelity by intermarrying with the daughters of men. The result was a race of giants--giants in capacity and crime as well as in bodily form--whose existence universal tradition attests. In almost open alliance with the powers of darkness, they sank with such fearful rapidity down the abyss of depravation, dragging with them the better portion of the race, that, to avert the triumph of hell and the utter reprobation of his creature, the offended Creator buried the guilty memories of colossal crime beneath an universal deluge, at whose subsidence the first civilization reappeared on the mountains of Asia in all its earliest purity, brought across the forty days’ extinction of life upon the earth by the eight souls who alone had turned a deaf ear to the universal seduction. “This idea of a gradual and deeper degradation of human kind,” says Frederick Schlegel, “in each succeeding age, appears at first sight not to accord very well with the testimony which sacred tradition furnishes on man’s primitive state, for it represents the two races of the primitive world as contemporary; and, indeed, Seth, the progenitor of the better and nobler race of virtuous patriarchs, was much younger than Cain. However, this contradiction is only apparent, if we reflect that it was the wicked and violent race which drew the other into its disorders, and that it was from this contamination a giant corruption sprang, which continually increased, till, with a trifling exception, it pervaded the whole mass of mankind, and till the justice of God required the extirpation of degenerate humanity by one universal flood.”

It does not admit of a moment’s doubt, as our author argues, that with this terrible judgment began the dissolution of that fraternal unity which God had intended should be the happy lot of the human family, and for which the configuration of the earth was adapted. The gigantic unity of crime was smitten to pieces in the helplessness of division. They who had been brothers looked in one another’s faces and found them strange. They opened their lips, and, lo! their speech was to others a jargon of unintelligible sounds. The one could no more understand the other than they could the wolf or the jackal with whom they both began to be mutually classed. The intercommunion of families of men with one another was rudely snapped asunder. There were no means of common action, there was no medium of common thought. The fragments into which the human family were smitten went off in different directions, to post themselves, in attitudes of mutual distrust and defiance, behind mountains or morasses, on the skirts of forests, the borders of torrents, or in the security of measureless deserts, where their practised eyes swept the horizon. Intercommunion was rendered still more impossible by the mutual antagonism, fear, and hatred that prevailed. And the very ocean, instead of being a pathway for the interchange of social life, became a formidable barrier between man and man. The dangers to be encountered on the lands to which the winds might bear them were more to be dreaded than the terrible phantoms which, issuing ever and anon from the home of the storms, raged across the ocean, and lashed into merciless fury its roaring waves. Memory had lost, in the primeval language, the key of its treasure-house. As years went on, amidst the exacting preoccupations of new ways of life, new surroundings, new ways of expressing their thoughts, and their increasing tribal or race isolation, the ideas upon which their primeval civilization had been based grew dimmer and dimmer, until they finally disappeared.

“To establish this in detail,” says the author of _Gentilism_, “is the purpose of this work.” And this purpose appears to us to have been accomplished in the most convincing manner.

The scientists maintain, and it is necessary to their evolution theory, that man began with barbarism, and moved slowly onwards in the gradual stages of their tedious evolution process towards what they call civilization, which is to lead, we believe, in the future developments of the ever-continuing evolution, to some loftier state and condition, of the nature of which they supply us with not the faintest idea.

This notion of the original barbarism of man is one of those fallacies which get imbedded in the general belief of mankind one knows not how. Strange to say, it has been very generally acquiesced in for no manner of reason; and it is only of late years that thoughtful men, outside of the faith, have come to suspect that it is not quite the truism they had imagined.

There is a reason for this: The attenuation of the claims of another world on the every-day life and on the conduct of men effected by the great revolt of the XVIth century, and the keener relish for the things of this life which consequently ensued, have infected the sentiments of mankind with an exaggerated sense of the importance of material objects and pursuits. Thus the idea of civilization, instead of being that of the highest development of the moral and whole inner being of social man, is limited to the discovery of all the unnumbered ways and means of administering to the embellishment and luxury of his actual life. His very mental progress, as they term it with extraordinary incorrectness, is only regarded in this light.

“The speculators on the stone, bronze, and iron ages,” writes
our author, “place civilization almost exclusively in the
enjoyment by man of a multitude of little inventions of his
own, many of which certainly are derived from the knowledge and
use of metals. Any nation deprived of them cannot be called
civilized in their opinion, because reduced to a very simple
state of life, which, they say unhesitatingly, is barbarism.…
Barbarism, in fact, depends much more on moral degradation
than on physical want of comfort. And when we come to describe
patriarchal society, our readers will understand how a tribe
or nation may deserve to be placed on an exalted round of the
social ladder, although living exclusively on the fruits of the
earth, and cultivating it with a simple wooden plough.”[237]

Father Thébaud next proceeds, with convincing force, to demolish the argument in behalf of the gradual evolution of the entire race from a state of barbarism, which the evolutionists allege to have been inevitably its first stage of intellectual consciousness drawn from the discovery of human skeletons in caves, and in the drift of long past ages, in juxtaposition with instruments of rude construction belonging to the palæolithic age and fossil remains of extinct animals. This argument has always appeared to us so feeble as to seem a mystery how it could be employed by learned men, unless in support of some preconceived opinion which they would maintain at all hazards. The occasional outbreaks of the Mississippi, the terrible devastation effected by the mere overflow of the Garonne in the South of France, give but a faint idea of what changes must have been effected upon the crust of the earth by the subsidence of the huge mass of water, which must have been at least eight or nine times as ponderous as all the oceans which have since lain at peace in its hollows. As the prodigious volumes of water, sucked and drawn hither and thither, as they hurried to their mountain-bed, rushed in furious tides and vast whirlpools of terrific force, they must have torn up the earth’s crust like a rotten rag. Whole valleys must have been scooped out down to the very root of the mountains, and _débris_ of all kinds deposited everywhere in all kinds of confusion, so as to afford no secure data whatever for chronological, or zoölogical, or geological deductions.

Still more conclusive is Father Thébaud’s refutation of the argument in behalf of the evolution theory drawn from the discovery of stone implements of rude construction in what is asserted to be the earliest drift deposit of iron in the later strata, and bronze in the latest. To make this argument of any force it must be proved that these periods evolved regularly and invariably from one another throughout the whole race of mankind. Their _periodicity_, as Father Thébaud has it, must be indisputably proved. But this is just what it cannot be. On the contrary,

“In this last age in which we live; in the previous ages,
which we can know by clear and unobjectionable history;
finally, in the dimmest ages of antiquity of which we possess
any sufficiently reliable records, the three ‘periods’ of
stone, bronze, and iron have always subsisted simultaneously,
and consequently are no more ‘periods’ when we speak of the
aggregate of mankind, but they are only three co-existing
aspects of the same specific individual.”[238]

To the same effect is the argument that

“The artistic distance between the rough palæolithic flints
and the polished stones of the neolithic period exhibits a gap
which tells but indifferently in favor of the believers in
continuous progress. Either there has been a strange severment
of continuity, or the men of the first period were better
artists, and not such rough barbarians as the remains we
possess of them seem to attest.”

The scientific arguments, however, of Father Thébaud, in disproof of the alleged original barbarism of the human race, satisfactory as they are, as far as they go, are little more than introductory to the more conclusive historical argument which constitutes the body of his valuable and very opportune work. “The best efforts to ascertain the origin of man,” he justly remarks, “or primeval religion, by the facts of geology or zoölogy, can at best only result in more or less probable conjectures.”

In an argument of this nature our author begins, as was to have been expected, from that philosophical, impassive, and ancient people who inhabit the triangular peninsula which stretches out from no vast distance from the original seat of the renewed race of man into the Southeastern Atlantic. There they have dwelt from times beyond which history does not reach. Inheriting a civilization which dates from the subsiding Deluge, whose gradual decadence can be distinctly traced, they are in possession of the earliest writings that exist, unless the books of Moses or the book of Job are older, which, we do not think it is rash to say, is, at least, doubtful. We find ourselves in the presence of the noblest truths of even supernatural religion, mingled, it is true, with the gross pantheistical absurdities which had already begun to deface the primitive revelation and to deteriorate the primitive civilization.

The general process throughout the world was, no doubt, as Father Thébaud describes--

“After a period of universal monotheism, the nations began to
worship ‘the works of God,’ and fell generally into a broad
pantheism. They took subsequently a second step, perfectly well
marked, later on, in Hindostan, Central Asia, Egypt, Greece,
etc.--a step originating everywhere in the imagination of
poets, materializing God, bringing him down to human nature
and weakness, and finally idealizing and deifying his supposed
representations in statuary and painting.”[239]

But we must venture to differ from Father Thébaud as to the religion of the Hindoos having ever taken the latter step. The form its pantheism took, in consequence of its tenets of the incarnations of Vishnu--the second god of the triad--and of metempsychosis, was a worship of animals, and especially of the cow--a worship which prevails to this day. But this was not the gross idolatry of the Greeks and Romans, but rather a respect, a _cultus_, in consequence of the supposed _possible_ presence in the former of departed friends, and of the incarnation of the divinity in the latter. Their idols are huge material representations of the might and repose which are the chief attributes of the Hindoo deity, or of animals with which the above-named ideas were especially associated; but we do not think they ever were worshipped as was, for example Diana by the Ephesians.

Be this as it may, it in no way affects the incontrovertible testimony which Father Thébaud adduces to the high state of civilization of this remarkable people fifteen hundred years, at all events, before Christ. He proves it from their social institutions, which issued from a kind of tribal municipality closely resembling the Celtic clans, but without the principle of superseding the rightful heir to a deceased _canfinny_ by another son in consequence of certain disqualifications, and that of the ever-recurring redistribution of land, which were the bane of Celtic institutions. The caste restrictions, our author shows from the laws of Menu, were not nearly so rigorous in those primitive ages; and from the same source he exhibits undeniable proof of that purity of morals which evidences the highest stage of civilization, and which has sunk gradually down to the vicious barbarism of the present day. We suspect, however, that this latter has been somewhat exaggerated. It is certainly our impression, taken from works written by those who have lived for years in familiar intercourse with the people, that amongst the Hindoo women there still lingers conspicuous evidence of the purity of morals which was universal amongst them in the beginning of their history.

It might have been added, moreover, that the laws of Menu, in addition to their high morality, display a knowledge of finance and political economy, of the science of government, and of the art of developing the resources of a people which indicate a very high state of civilization indeed.

It is impossible for us, within the limits assigned us, to follow Father Thébaud through an argument consisting exclusively of learned detail. Our readers, if they would have any proper appreciation of it, must consult the work itself. We remark merely that, starting from the admitted fact that the Vedas contain the doctrine of plain and pure monotheism, and that in those distant ages “doctrines were promulgated and believed in” “which far transcend all the most solemn teaching of the greatest philosophers who flourished in the following ages, and which yield only to the sublime and exquisitely refined teachings of Incarnate Wisdom,”[240] our author traces the inroads of pantheism from the time when the doctrine, recently revived by men once Christians, of an “universal soul” was openly proclaimed, and “when it was asserted that our own is a ‘spark’ from the ‘blazing fire,’ that God is ‘all beings,’ and ‘all beings are God.’”[241] And he traces elaborately the change through the several mystical works of the philosophical Brahmins subsequent to the Vedas. Buddhism is a comparatively modern development. We doubt its being any form of Hindooism whatever. It appears to us to be rather the earliest development of that spirit of hostility to the life-giving truths of the Christian revelation which began its work almost at their very cradle--that abject principle of materialism which, after having dragged down the vast populations of China and of North and Western India to the lowest depths of mental and moral degradation of which human nature is susceptible, is now sweeping over Christendom, and threatening to “deceive,” if it were possible, “even the very elect.”

Father Thébaud’s next chapter is devoted to a historical review of the primeval religion and its decline in Central Asia and Africa. And here the proof is more overwhelming, if possible, than in the case of India. As to the monotheism of the great Doctor--if we may give him such a title--of the ancient East, and of the Zends, there can be no manner of doubt. Nay, “even the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is clearly contained in the most authentic part of the Zend-Avesta.” There is also that august personage, apart from all superior beings under God, “who stands between God and man; shows the way to heaven, and pronounces judgment upon human actions after death; guards with his drawn sword the whole world against the demons; has his own light from inside, and from outside is decorated with stars.” Our author makes Zoroaster, at the latest, a contemporary of Moses, and justly observes that the Zend-Avesta “represents the thoughts of men very near the origin of our species.” Now, the magnificent eloquence and profound truth of the thoughts we meet, rivalling at times the Book of Job, the beauty of the prayers, and the elaborate splendor of the ritual, testify to a very different state of things in those earliest days from that alleged by the evolutionists. Father Thébaud decides the Zends to be Vedic, and not Persian. And no doubt in the remarkable form and construction of the poems--dramatic, and mostly in the form of dialogue--in the tone of thought and leading religious ideas, they closely resemble the Hindoo Vedas. But it is our impression that we do not find in the writings of Zoroaster that perpetual insistence on the necessity of absorption into the deity which characterizes the Hindoo poems--the _Bhagavât-Gita_, for example. It would appear that the Persians occupied a special place in the dispensation of God in the ancient world. The Holy Spirit, in the prophecies, speaks of “my servant Cyrus whom I have chosen,” and it is certain that the pure monotheistic worship was preserved longer in Persia than in any nation of antiquity, except the Jewish. Its corruption was into dualism, by which the spirit of evil, as in the Indian _Trimourti_, was invested with almost co-ordinate power with the spirit of good. But for full information on this important and interesting subject we must refer the reader to Father Thébaud himself.

Our limits do not admit of our giving scarcely the faintest outline of our author’s argument in proof of the monotheism of Pelasgic Greece, and its gradual degradation to a sensual and idolatrous anthropomorphism in Hellenic and Heroic Greece. The substantial genuineness of the Orphic literature he successfully establishes, as well as the similarity of its doctrines to those of the Vedas; from which he draws the obvious inference that the two came from the same source, and that that branch of the Aryan family carried with them to their more distant settlements traditions of the primitive revelation so conspicuous in the Persian and Hindoo mystic epics, but much defaced and distorted in the course of their long and toilsome migrations. If _pure_ monotheism ever prevailed in Pelasgic Greece, its reign was short. Indeed, to Orpheus himself are ascribed pantheistic doctrines. It was the poets who ushered in that special form of idolatry which took possession of Greece, the worship of the human being deified with all his infirmities--the _anthropomorphism_ of the gods, as Father Thébaud calls it. And the chief sinner, on this score, was Homer, the first and greatest of them all. Yet did that densely-populated, unseen world of the Greeks--that sensuous, nay vicious, idolatry--which peopled the ocean and the mountains and the forests with gods, and imagined a divinity for every fountain, and every grove, and every valley, and every rill, with its superior deities, up to the supreme father of Olympus, himself subject to that forlorn solution of the riddle of “evil”--fate--bear witness from Olympus, and from Hades, and from the realms of the sea, to the primitive revelation. It bore witness to a civilization from which that degradation of the ideas of God to the level of humanity, in spite of its artistic grace and poetic feeling, deformed, however, by a filthy lasciviousness, with its short period of literary splendor and of exalted philosophy, ending with the sophistical negations of scepticism, was a fall, and not a progress.

For all this, “the precious fragments of a primitive revelation are found,” as Father Thébaud truly observes, “scattered through the writings of nearly all ancient Greek and Latin philosophers and poets.” His two chapters on this subject--chapter vii. on “Hellenic Philosophy as a Channel of Tradition,” and chapter viii. on “The Greek and Latin Poets as Guardians of Truth”--are perhaps the most interesting part of his most interesting and instructive work. They embrace a subject which has always appeared to us as more worthy of learned labor than any other which could be named. That life would be well spent which should devote itself to collecting all these fragments of traditionary truth from all ante-Christian literatures. Such a work would not turn back the flood of rationalism, whose first risings we owe to Greece--for it is rather moral than intellectual--but it would materially obstruct it, and would rescue from it many souls which might otherwise be lured to their destruction by the feeble echoes of the sophists and Aristophanes, which, beginning with Voltaire, are now multiplying through all the rationalistic press of the world.

Meanwhile, we cordially commend Father Thébaud’s work on _Gentilism_ to the attentive study of all who wish for solid information and sagacious criticism on a subject which appears to us, without wishing in the least to underrate scientific investigation, to be more interesting and more important than all or any of the discoveries of physical science. These, as has been proved of late years, may be turned against the truth, and become thus a means of darkening instead of enlightening the soul. At the best, be they correct or erroneous, great or small, many or few, they cannot add an inch to our stature or a day to our lives. They do not even add to our happiness.

But a false science--one which would assign to each of us an insignificant phenomenal existence, whose individuality will disappear, at the end of its few days of living consciousness, in an universal whole in an eternal state of progress--is as fatal to human happiness as anything can be short of the abyss of reprobation. More consoling, as it is more in accordance with right reason, is the testimony which comes to us trumpet-tongued, in one vast unison, from all the ages, that the history of the race is one of decadence, not of progress. The sentence passed was death. The road to death is decadence. The way is rounded; there is a movement onward and a growth of life until the descent begins which lands us in dissolution. But every moment from the first cry of infancy is a step nearer to death; we are every one of us dying every day; and a movement towards death is not progress. Individual experience joins its voice to that of universal history in testimony of this. The revelation of Christ has put us in possession of the highest and certain truth; it has given us a more exalted moral, and has recast our nature in a higher, nay, in a divine, mould. We are still dying every day; but the certain hope of a joyful resurrection has deprived death of its agonizing sting, and made it, like sleep, a source of happiness instead of despair. But this is nothing like the progress of which the sceptics prate. It is a supernatural stage in the dispensation of God for the renewal of his fallen creature, predetermined before all time. His own part in it--the natural order--is one long history of decadence. There has been the ebb and flow, the rising to fall, of all movement. But decadence has all along triumphed over progress. Amidst what a decadence are we now living from the promising progress of the middle ages! And we are bid to expect so terrific a retrogression before the consummation of all things, that “even the elect shall scarcely be saved.”

It is the witness of all the ages--human progress ebbing and flowing--but, on the whole, the flow does not overtake the ebb. The ocean of life has been ever ebbing into its eternal abysses, and will ebb, leaving behind it a dry and barren waste, until the morning of eternity shall break over the withdrawing night of time, chaos shall be for ever sealed in the confusion and sadness of its darkness, and the final word shall go forth, of which the sublime physical law was only a type and a shadow: “Let there be light!”

MADAME’S EXPERIMENT.

A SAINT AGNES’ EVE STORY.

“MY THOUGHTS ARE NOT YOUR THOUGHTS, NOR YOUR WAYS MY WAYS, SAITH THE LORD.”

Madame the Countess of Hohenstein stood at the window of the great hall of her palace, waiting for the coach which was to take her to a _château_ some leagues distant, where she was to grace a grand entertainment, and to be kept for a whole night by her hosts as an especial treasure. For Madame the Countess of Hohenstein, spite of her sixty years and her three grown sons, was a famous beauty still and a brilliant conversationist, and few were her rivals, young or old, throughout the kingdom. But her face was clouded as she waited in her stately hall that January afternoon, and she listened with a pained expression to the sound of a footstep overhead pacing steadily up and down. She touched a bell presently.

“Tell your master,” she said to the servant who answered it, “that I wish to see him again before I leave.” And soon down the winding stairway she watched a young man come with the same steady pace which might have been heard overhead for a half-hour past.

No need to ask the relationship between the two. Black, waving hair, broad brow, set lips, firm chin, the perfect contour of the handsome face--all these were the son’s heritage of remarkable beauty from his queenly mother; but the headstrong pride and excessive love which shone from her eyes as he came in sight met eyes very different from them. Large and black indeed they were, but their intense look, however deep the passion it bespoke, told of an unearthly passion and a fire that is divine.

“Ah! Heinrich love,” his mother said, “once more, come with me.”

“Nay, little mother,” he answered--the caressing diminutive sounding strangely as addressed to her in her pomp of attire and stately presence--“you said I need not go; that you did not care for me at the baron’s.”

“Not so, Heinrich. I care for you everywhere, everywhere. I am lost without you, love of my soul. But I know you hate it, and, if you must stay from any place, better that than some others. There are no maidens there I care for, my son.”

She watched the calm forehead contract as she spoke. “There! as ever,” she exclaimed. “Wilt never hear woman mentioned without a frown? You are no monk yet, child, at your twentieth year; nor ever shall be, if I can help it. It is enough for me, surely, to have given two sons to the priesthood, without yielding up my last one, my hope and my pride.”