From dawn to sunrise

Front matter

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FROM DAWN TO SUNRISE.

Contents

GENESIS.

Page.

Authorities, — The Bible — Dr. Kitto's Commentaries — Dr. Dawson's Archaia — Prof. WinchalFs Sketches — American Cyclopedia — Proctor's Astronomy — Lockyer's Astronomy and Smith's Astronomy.

Introduction

A FEAR agitates the mind of the Christian philosopher, at the present time, that another great religious eclipse is impending, such as have during historic times chilled the soul of mankind for ages and destroyed its liberty and spiritual vitality.

Europe lay under a penumbra of gloom and horror from the sixth to the sixteenth centuries, — the Dark Ages. Then religion, divorced from science, was wedded to superstition and priestcraft in the bands of an infernal wedlock, and the fearful progeny of such an unholy union was slavery, intellectual stupefaction, all crime known to human law, unnameable vice, and physical disease. At that melancholy period it was religiously taught that a man could purchase from another man, with money, exemption from penalty in this world and the world to come, even though committing the foulest murder and treason; but if he denied that the bread and wine in the hands of the priest was not miraculously transformed into the actual body of the crucified Saviour, if he refused to assert that the autocrat who sat in St. Peter's chair, steeped in venality, vice and crime, was the vicegerent of the Prince of Peace and Purity, if he dared to believe that the earth turned upon its axis, he was subjected to all the indignity and bodily torture the ingenuity of man, aided by the Devil, could devise. Witness the horrors of the

Inquisition in Spain and Holland, the reign of religious terror in France and England.

The extremists of the Church of Rome are attempting again to drag the world backward into the gloomy realms of paganism and priestcraft.

But another and an opposite peril also endangers the spiritual life of the world — science now sues for a divorce from religion ; if this result were to be accomplished the soul of man, driven into the deadly ether spaces of Atheism, would be chilled and starved into moral atrophy and death. The modern school of Atheists offer to the inquiring soul only the antiquated principles of Buddha and Laotse.

Prof. Fiske, in one of the New York daily papers, advances this mystifying idea of Deity : " There exists a power in time and space, of which all phenomena are manifestations, but which one can only know through these manifestations,'' that is, there has never been, and cannot be, a revelation of God. He adds : " What is this wondrous Dynamis ? Shall we call it gravitation, or light, or heat, or electricity, or life, or thought, or summing up all into one comprehensive epithet, call it Force ?" Straus, Renan, Huxley, Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall, and many other scientific leaders, following the guides of past ages, puzzle themselves over Nature and Organic Law, The Universum, the Absolute, Force, Dynamis ! " God shall laugh, the Lord shall have them in derision, for they have said in their hearts and have proclaimed to the world that there is no God ! only blind law, without a law maker. Fortunately, average common sense men have clearer moral perception and greater intellectual integrity. Giving conscience, as well as reason, a candid hearing, they know that beyond natural causes, there must be One who creates law and nature, a providential personal Ruler, to whom they are responsible, and they call this Being, God. Yet the attack of modern skepticism is so subtle, the arguments so specious, that the unthinking and unguarded are deceived, and weak faith is shaken. " At this moment a general doubt is coming up like a thunder-cloud against the wind. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were educated confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe, but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe it, they cannot tell and cannot agree. The truth of gospel history is more widely doubted than at any time since the conversion of Constantine, and every Christian who desires to remain one, and who knows anything of what is passing in the world, is looking to be told on what evidence the New Testament claims to be received. ,, * " We cannot foresee the exact influence of scientific discovery upon the future, but it is clear that once more men will be brought face to face with the deepest questions of religious belief/' 2

Beside these scientific infidels, there is another class of scholars who exalt the sacred writings of the Hindoos and Persians, now just becoming familiar, above those of the Jews and Christians. An Atheist enquired of me, a few years ago, if I was acquainted with these ancient books ; confessing my ignorance, he startled me by saying, " I can show you in the Vedas and the Avesta, that which is far better and purer than anything to be found in your musty old Bible. ,,

Unable to refute the assertion I could only answer,

1 Mr. Froude. 2 Rev. Mr. Fowle.

" 'By their fruits ye shall know them.' Are the countries where their influence prevails better governed, more civilized, and happier, than ours where the Bible controls ? " Can those defiled Oriental temples or their tyrannical, immoral priests, be compared with our Christian churches and God-fearing clergymen ? "

He was silent, but might he not have retorted, " Can I not show you in mediaeval Europe, Christians, monks as vile, institutions as cruel, and fetichism as grovelling as anything Brahmanism has produced ? Is any worship grosser than that of dead mens bones, and rotten wood said to be relics of the true cross ? and did any religion ever invent instruments of torture more infernal and ply them in such fiendish fashion, as did the Inquisition of Spain under his most Christian majesty Philip the Second, and his successors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries ? Look at the atrocities practised by one Christian sect towards another in France, when Huguenots and Waldenses perished by thousands, and in England, during the reign of Bloody Mary and James the Second, when the rack, the gibbet, the boot, and the fires of Smithfield, mutilated and tortured the bodies of men, made in the image of God ?

What answer could be given to these questions ? I felt that Christianity could be defended, but how I knew not ! With foes in its own citadel who would use its mantle of charity and its banner of liberty for the purpose of idolatry and despotism, assailed from without by scientific atheists who would prove its weakness and fallacy by their superior knowledge of natural law, and by sophists who would offer other sacred writings as a substitute for the New Testament, could Christianity stand ?

Two paramount problems are offered to the perplexed inquirer. First, What is Truth ? Second, Is the teaching of Jesus Christ its embodiment, or are we to have another revelation? Nothing is demonstrable but mathematical truth ; there is no other positive science ; theories with regard to natural law even are constantly changing ; we cannot prove any religious truth by demonstration, better than we can prove the existence of God in that way, and " who by searching can find out God ! " Yet if history proves anything, it is that man is a religious being, that " the intuition of God is a part of the original dowry of human nature." We know that we have come into the world like countless generations which have preceded us ; birth or circumstances over which we have no control have determined our position in life ; we are greatly absorbed in pursuits which, perhaps, are not of our own choice, and we are conscious that we are hurrying through this phase of existence, that in a limited time of which we are in ignorance, we shall disappear forever and our places be filled by the ever renewed, ever vanishing phantoms of human existence !

Who placed us here ? Who controls our being ? and whither do we go ? are the momentous questions which agitate the soul in the solemn hours of thought. Then comes the feeling that there is a Supreme Power and the desire to be in accord with this Being, and religion dawns in the soul.

A tendency to atheism shows a defective mental constitution, in individual cases. Without the balance which a sense of responsibility to a Supreme Ruler gives to human character, the intellectual machinery (if I may be allowed the expression) run§ irregularly and gets into fatal disorder. In such organizations as Tyndall's, Huxley's, and Spencer's, there is little danger of immorality, for the sensorium is impoverished by an undue development of the reflective organs, passion and appetite are enfeebled, and the one-sided, ill-balanced nature exhibits a frozen intellectuality only less to be deplored than grosser faults. But among the middle ranks immorality and secret vice is the unhappy result, while lower and more brutal natures, freed from responsibility to a Higher Power who can punish sin, develope an amazing proclivity to monstrous crimes and nameless abominations. Where this form of disbelief becomes universal and takes possession of a nation, " the wave of ungodliness is a sure precursor of convulsion." 1 Such was the condition of Rome previous to its downfall, and France in the latter part of the eighteenth century. At that time the Abbe Gregoire said to the National Assembly : " Write the name of God at the head of the declarations, or you leave them without foundation ; you declare not the rights of man, but the right of the strongest ; you inaugurate a reign of violence." The assembly declined ; they listened to the voice of atheistic monsters forced from the icy torpor of their original natures into active life by the fierce fires of fanaticism. Monsieur Proudhon said : " The Revolution looked Him in the face and said to itself, ■ I will conquer Him ; it is war we proclaim against God. Be it so, let us make war upon Him ! Let us drive the eternal Father back into His remote heaven, His presence among us hangs upon a thread, the Revolution does not mince matters with the Deity ! ' " The Reign of Terror followed, anarchy, destruction, social chaos, was the inevitable consequence,

1 Froude.

and a reformation of society was impossible till there was a revival of religious faith.

Religion has been universal in all ages and nations, though the intuition of God has taken strange and diverse types. Imperfect man, in the search for truth, has ever mixed it with a great amount of fatal error ! the n atural religions are dark, burdensome, cruel, enslaving, not one of them represent God with the attribute of love ; our humanity and moral sense are outraged and shocked by the indecency, ferocity and degradation with which they are characterized, so that we are ready to exclaim, " O religion, how many crimes have been committed in thy name ! " We long to see God, but we would see Him in the light, not through the defiling smoke of lurid sacrifices ; we would believe in a Being pure and good, unswayed by passion, of infinite and eternal repose. We feel the dignity of manhood and the strength of an immortal nature ; we revolt at the thought of being slaves to a cruel despot or a blind Fate ; we * demand a religion of liberty as well as love, a God who can pardon as well as punish, and we sigh, " Oh, that we could find Him ! n Many of the old religions are obsolete, and others give warning of decrepitude and dissolution. But frcm the very nature of things Truth is eternal. What then gives evidence of inherent vitality ? What of religious truth has survived the shock of ages ? We have been taught to believe that in the Christian religion God's eternal truth is found, but few can defend the assumption. Many in their own hearts are doubtful, and while the materialist calls our religion superstition and our faith credulity, we wonder if it is so.

The solution of the great problem cannot be found in the old methods of proving religious truth. The inspiration of the Apostles, their supernatural power, or even the miracles of Christ, prove nothing at this time, for they must be received on the testimony of men, and that is always liable to error. The fact that our fathers so believed must pass for nothing ; we cannot know religious truth, we must feel it ; conscience, through reason, must be convicted of its inherent essential perfection and adaptation to the needs of humanity.

If by comparing Christianity with all the other religions of the world we are able to detect, from internal evidence, the indications of its superhuman origin ; if we perceive that while the others have been suited to a particular state of society, race, climate, or era, Christianity, from its elastic and progressive character, is adapted to every grade of intellectual development, every phase of human nature, all conditions and all ages ; if the religious ideas which have survived the wrecks of time are here embodied, then it is self-evident, that it must have been given by the All- Knowing One, who alone could have provided for every case and every emergency.

For this purpose we should in a candid spirit take up the history of the principal religions of the world, begining with the oldest of them all, the religion of our primogenitors, Adam and Eve — a review of which necessitates an examination of the Mosaic writings contained in the first chapters of the Bible, as also other traditions of the great events therein described ; we should examine the supposed discrepancy between the Mosaic account of the creation and the revelations of modern science, discuss the nature and extent of the great Deluge and the important events which followed the Confusion of Tongues and Dispersion of the Tribes, which resulted in diversities of language, race and religion.

Of these subsequent developments we should investigate the Chinese, ancient Persian, the religion and philosophy of India, Brahmanism and Buddhism, the religions of Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome, the Hebrew, Scandinavian and Mohammedan faiths, comparing them lastly with the religion which Christ brought into the world. In the pursuit of this great subject we should resort to the rich storehouses of tradition, history and natural science, and penetrate still further into the dim recesses of the pre-historic past; with the archaeologist enter the tombs and pyramids of Egypt, walk through the amazing subterranean rock temples of India, visit the giant cities of Bashan, muse upon the Assyrian mounds and puzzle over their inscribed brick — linger by the strange rock inscriptions found throughout the Orient, ponder over the serpent mounds and other ruins of our own country, and gaze with awe at the ever recurring mystery of the obelisk ! For us, the philologist should unlock the arcanum of language, his magic touch will unveil many a bright gem of thought concealed through the ages in the plain cover of a familiar word. Ethnology must also lend its aid, by which we shall become acquainted with the almost incredible changes and varieties which have been produced from one original stock, by climate, food, configuration of continents, pursuits of life, intermarriage and education. And this branch of our subject will lead us to look very charitably upon the religious practices of those whose constitutions and mental methods are so diverse from our own — we shall lose that self-conceit which has led us unduly to exalt our own excellence, and we shall glorify one common Father and God, who has gathered to their rest and reward millions of souls whom we, in our bigotry, have sometimes supposed were lost : "I beheld, and lo a great multitude, that no man could number, of all nations, and kindred, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes and with palms in their hands/' We should thus discover the transcendent superiority of the Christian religion; but learning how rapidly other religions have deteriorated and become corrupt, when they lost the simplicity of the founders, we shall be warned of our own danger in this respect, perceiving with dismay, that Christians do not embody Christianity, and that we have almost lost the original idea.

The following pages are the result of years of study in attempt to solve the great religious problem in this comprehensive manner ; and although, as I am painfully conscious, it is very imperfectly done, if it serves to give any one arguments wherewith to defend his religious faith, if it leaves any with less bigotry and self-conceit, with more love for all mankind, with greater confidence in the final triumph of Christianity, and an increased desire for its practical possession, then shall I thank God, who sometimes " uses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty." The paths of this investigation have been ways of great pleasantness, and in the journey I have found exceeding peace, for although in travelling far back through the dim vistas of the shadowy past I have sometimes walked through the very valley and shadow of moral death, where frightful sounds and awful shapes assault the sense, and sometimes have groped in the twilight gleam of the ages, so far from the light of Truth that I could almost exclaim, like those condemned in the valleys of Dante's Inferno, " All hope abandon ye who enter here!" yet through all the devious way, I could ever discern a divine voice and a beckoning hand, leading onward and upward, till at last appeared upon Mount Calvary's summit the resplendent Sun of Righteousness, before whose beams the mists of error and darkness, sin and death shall forever flee away !

Chapter I. Genesis

"Chaos and Old Night."

THE Beginning, when was it ? The Dawn of Creation, whence came it ? What caused the first dimmer of light that thrilled the heart of universal darkness ? To find the Beginning, we must go backward through the rolling ages, backward along the slowly rounding cycles, through the stillness of the awful aeons, till the soul, fainting upon the trackless limits of Time, incapable of further retrograde, sinks mute and motionless upon the verge of God's Eternity ! At some point in this inconceivable period of duration was The Beginning, when a Pre-existent Power created the original atoms.

Tradition has been quaintly called "the heart of history/' " the faint reverberations of its distant bell," its indications should never be neglected ; for " although the echoes are many, the voice is one," and that, we may be sure, is the voice of Truth. We will therefore begin the answer to our inquiries with traditions of the Creation which are not confined to the Hebrew Scriptures, but are common to all the tribes of men in the most disconnected and distant parts of the earth. Many of these are mixed with monstrous and incredible myths, but they preserve one general idea.

In the Rig Vida, the oldest of the Hindoo sacred books, the following remarkable passage occurs : " Nothing, yon bright sky was not, nor heaven's broad woof outstretched above ! What covered all, what sheltered, what concealed ? Was it the water s fathomless abyss ? Darkness was there, and all was veiled in gloom profound, an ocean without light. The germ that still lay covered in the husk burst forth, one nature, from the fervent *heat."

Phoenician cosmogony represents the brooding spirit on the deep, and the word baan is almost identical with the Hebrew bohn, both meaning void or empty.

The Greek fable of the war of giants who, when cut to pieces, resumed life in new forms, was no doubt intended to convey the idea of the conflict of elements and their reforming by gradations. Prometheus, one of these giants, formed the first human pair from clay, and stole fire from heaven to animate them.

The Scandinavian legend is, " In the beginning there was neither sky, nor sun, nor gelid wave, only a dark frozen mist. Then the cow, Adhumbla, licking the hoar frost, brings to light a man from whom the Giant Yemir was born, from his skull the vault of heaven was formed, from his brain the heavy clouds, from his bones the rocks, and from his flesh the earth."

The Chinese idea is not unlike the Scandinavian. It is, that a giant, after laboring for ages among masses of granite floating in a chaotic condition, chisels out a world, and when he dies his work is finished by the transformation of his dead body into the sky, and sea, and earth.

The cosmogony of the Aztecs is very remarkable, though almost puerile in its simplicity, as contained in their National Book, the Popol Vuh. " There was not yet a single man, nor an animal, bird, fish, or crab, or wood, or stone, or ravine, or herb, or forest. There was only the silent sea and the sky. Naught attached itself to another naught that balanced itself, no sound in the sky, in the peaceful sea, the sea silent and solitary in its limits. Those who fecundate, those who give being, are upon the waters like a growing light. While they consulted, the day broke, and at the moment of dawn man appeared. Thus they consulted while the earth grew. Earth, said they, and the earth existed. Like a fog, like a cloud vas its formation, as huge fishes rise in the water, so rose the mountains. At that time spake he who gives life, the Maker, the Moulder, Tepen Gucumatz. The day draws near, the work is done, the servant is ennobled. He is the son of light, the child of whiteness, the race of man is on the earth. Thought was in them. They perceived the world and the sky. Then asked the Builder and the Moulder, What think ye of your being ? See ye not ! your language, your limbs, are they not good ? Then they looked and saw all that was beneath the heavens, and they gave thanks, saying, Truly, twice three times thanks, we have being, we speak, we understand, we think, we feel. Thanks to Thee, O Maker and Moulder, that we have been created, that we have being, Oh, our Grand-Mother ! Oh, our Grand-Father ! "

The Peruvians called the first pair Alpha Casmasca, animated earth.

Some tribes of North American Indians believed that the Great Spirit made two figures of clay, to which he gave life by breathing upon them.

The Otaheitans say that Toeroa, their god, made men of red earth. The Dyacks of Borneo have the same idea.

These traditions have been selected as from their origin, and the great distance which separates the tribes who retain them, they could scarcely have been borrowed from . the writings of Moses, neither could Moses have compiled from them. There must have been a common origin for this similar and wide-spread belief.

Setting aside any claim to Divine inspiration, the Mosaic account is more probable and circumstantial, freer from puerilities and inconsistencies than any other extant. The antiquarian, the scientist, the philosopher, and above all, the theologian, will regard this antique gem as the most precious fragment of literature in existence.

We will now endeavor to ascertain if the contempt and discredit often thrown upon it is justified by a fair, critical examination of the text, " In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth : " that is, at some point in that incomprehensible orbit, " whose centre is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere/' the Eternal created the material of the universe. The great centre of our solar system, a speck in the vast unfathomable depths of space, balances and controls its hundred satellites, and with them whirls and circles through an orbit which takes twenty-four thousand of our years to complete ; a solar year, an hour perhaps in the chronology of still greater spheres. A student in geology once asked a learned professor, "What was the probable duration of the Archaic Period ? " The answer was, " Geology knows no age. The Silurian period, much shorter than the Archaic, as nearly as we can calculate, was thirty-eight million of years /" The ancient Hindoos had a better conception of time than we, for they calculated cycles, which were expressed by a unit and sixty ciphers ; our finite minds talter in striving to reach such a limit. The Infinite alone can comprehend the aeonic revolutions which have passed since the Beginning, when, by a direct act or the operation of a law of his own making, " God created the heavens and the earth."

For a period after the great solar year began " the earth was without form and void." The period here described has in former times been little understood. Confusion and darkness enveloped it, which it seemed could never be penetrated ; but the almost inspired genius of Sir John Herschell, and afterwards that of La Place, have made clear the meaning. They tell us that the form in which matter first existed was that of igneous vapor or gas of inconceivable attenuity. It was without form or outline, like a wisp of fog, and it was void as mist is, without substance.

If we peer through the cold vacancies of the sky, beyond the firmament of stars in which we are placed, we can faintly discern a few filmy or cloudy spots, which, unlike the flitting vapors of our atmosphere, are unchanging. Powerful telescopes reveal five thousand of these spots scattered throughout space. They are called Nebula, clouds. Some of them are proved by the spectroscopes to be firmaments of stars, like that in which our own solar system is situated, of which the Milky Way is the vast outer rim ; but others are shown to be gas in a state of incandescence, glowing so intensely that the light, after ages, has reached our earth. These gaseous nebulae are supposed to be the crude materials of solar systems, incipient worlds in the same process of formation as that by which our own has attained its present form. The attenuated mass was moved upon by some power or principle, perhaps electricity, the particles attract and repel, being suspended in free space ; rotation is the consequence. Radiation of heat takes place and consequently condensation, the particles nearest each other are aggregated or gathered together, densest on the outer edge ; a ring is formed as by the water thrown from a rapidly revolving grindstone ; this ring of matter, still striving to keep up the rotation around the central mass, oscillates, and at last breaks, rolling on into a sphere, which continues to revolve about the original centre, and thus the first planet is formed ; in its own limited sphere the same process goes on and a moon is produced, perhaps many are made before the parent planet is too cold and solid to throw off another ring. A great burning mass is at last left in the centre, a sun, and the solar system is now complete.

This theory is corroborated by the form and appearance of the nebulous spots before mentioned ; some of them being almost without outline and apparently without motion, others so distorted and confused as to suggest the idea of an electrical shock, others are seen with regular rays as if preparing for rotation, some in spiral form, as if rotation was just established, still others are circular, one has a dense spot on the edge of the mass as if the first ring had broken and rolled into a sphere, and in another a condensation in the centre seems to indicate that the sun is forming. The planets Jupiter and Saturn are supposed by some astronomers to be still in the condition of our earth at that period when " the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." The rings of

Saturn, still in a fluid state, will continue to revolve around it, till some outward conjoined attraction or internal convulsion unsettles them and they are rolled into additional moons.

Our Earth having been separated from the parent mass, and having thrown off her satellite, rolled on for ages, perhaps during Hindoo cycles, obedient to nature's immutable laws, slowly cooling and condensing, the fiery gas became a glowing substance, and smoke and flame were born. Here was the reign of " chaos and old night." As the condensation increased, a filmy crust was formed, the attraction of the heavenly bodies and the motion of the seething fluid beneath break and pile this crust unequally, and the ribs of earth, the germs of mountains and continents appear. "A scene of terrific sublimity now approaches. As the dusky atmosphere began to thicken, wisps of vapor crept along, the heavens growing thick and dark till an impending pall enveloped earth and sky, blotting out the light of the sun and moon for a geological age. Rain drops began to descend, but were scorched to evaporation. At length they reach the fervid crust, but only to be exploded and driven back to the over-burdened cloud which had an ocean to transfer to the earth. In the midst of this cosmical contest between fire and water, the voice of heaven's artillery was heard. Lightning darted through the Cimmerian gloom and world convulsing thunders echoed through the universe. A thousand years of storm and darkness have passed, the primeval tempest draws to a close, the clouds are at last exhausted, and the morning of another geological epoch dawns/' l