Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/890

870 George the Second, if saying of Charles Edward "the man is become as one of us," have intended to convey a singular or a plural meaning* Can we disprove the assertion of Bishop Harold Browne, that this plurality of dignity is unknown to the language of Scripture? And further, if we make the violent assumption that the Christian Church with its one voice is wrong and Dr. Réville right, and that the words were not meant to convey the idea of plurality, yet, if they have been such as to lead all Christendom to see in them this idea through 1800 years, how can he be sure that they did not convey a like signification to the earliest hearers or readers of the Book of Genesis?

The rest of Dr. Réville's criticism is directed rather to the significance or propriety, than to the truth, of the record. It is not necessary to follow his remarks in detail, but it will help the reader to judge how far even a perfectly upright member of the scientific and comparative school can indulge an unconscious bias, if notice be taken in a single instance of his method of comparing. He compares together the two parts of the prediction that the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent, and that the serpent shall bruise the heel of the seed of the woman (iii, 15); and he conceives the head and the heel to be so much upon a par in their relation to the faculties and the vitality of a man that he can find here nothing to indicate which shall get the better, or, in his own words, "on which side shall be the final victory" (p. 45). St. Paul seems to have taken a different view when he wrote, "the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly" (Rom. xvi., 20).

Moreover, "our author" (in Dr. Réville's phrase) is censured because he "takes special care to point out" (p. 44) "that the first pair are as yet strangers to the most elementary notions of morality," inasmuch as they are unclothed, yet without shame; nay, even, as he feelingly says, "without the least shame." In what the morality of the first pair consisted, this is hardly the place to discuss. But let us suppose for a moment that their morality was simply the morality of a little child, the undeveloped morality of obedience, without distinctly formed conceptions of an ethical or abstract standard. Is it not plain that their feelings would have been exactly what the Book describes (Gen. ii, 25), and yet that in their loving obedience to their Father and Creator they would certainly have had a germ, let me say an opening bud, of morality? But this proposition, taken alone, by no means does justice to the case. Dr. Réville would probably put aside with indifference or contempt all that depends upon the dogma of the Fall. And yet there can be no more rational idea, no idea more palpably sustained, whether by philosophy or by experience. Namely, this idea: that the commission of sin, that is, the act of deliberately breaking a known law of duty, injures the nature and composition of the being who commits it. It injures that nature in deranging it, in altering the proportion of its parts and powers, in introducing an inward disorder and rebellion of the lower against the higher, too mournfully corresponding with that disorder and rebellion produced without, as toward God, of which the first sin was the fountain head. Such is, I believe, the language of Christian theology and in particular of St. Augustine, one of its prime masters. On this matter I apprehend that Dr. Réville, when judging the author of Genesis, judges him without regard to his fundamental ideas and aims, one of which was to convey that before sinning man was a being morally and physically balanced, and nobly pure in every faculty; and that, by and from his sinning, the sense of shame found a proper and necessary place in a nature which before was only open to the sense of duty and of reverence.

One further observation only. Dr. Réville seems to "score one" when he finds (Gen. iv, 26) that Seth had a son, and that "then began men to call on the name of the Lord"; "but not," he adds, "as the result of a recorded revelation." Here at last he has found, or seemed to find, the beginning of religion, and that beginning subjective, not revealed. So hastily, from the first aspect of the text, does he gather a verbal advantage, which, upon the slightest inquiry, would have disappeared like dew in the morning sun. He assumes the rendering of a text which has been the subject of every kind of question and dispute, the only