Part 5 — Chapter I. Preliminary.

I. Man a Creation of God and a Child of God.

The fact of man's creation is declared in Gen. 1:27—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

(a) The Scriptures, on the one hand, negate the idea that man is the mere product of unreasoning natural forces. They refer his existence to a cause different from mere nature, namely, the creative act of God.

Compare Hebrews 12:9—“the Father of spirits”; Num. 16:22—“the God of the spirits of all flesh”; 27:16—“Jehovah, the God of the spirits of all flesh”; Rev. 22:6—“the God of the spirits of the prophets.” Bruce, The Providential Order, 25—“Faith in God may remain intact, though we concede that man in all his characteristics, physical and psychical, is no exception to the universal law of growth, no breach in the continuity of the evolutionary process.” By “merenature” we mean nature apart from God. Our previous treatment of the doctrine of creation in general has shown that the laws of nature are only the regular methods of God, and that the conception of a nature apart from God is an irrational one. If the evolution of the lower creation cannot be explained without taking into account the originating agency of God, much less can the coming into being of man, the crown of all created things. Hudson, Divine Pedigree of Man: “Spirit in man is linked with, because derived from, God, who is spirit.”

(b) But, on the other hand, the Scriptures do not disclose the method of man's creation. Whether man's physical system is or is not derived, by natural descent, from the lower animals, the record of creation does not inform us. As the command “Let the earth bring forth living creatures” (Gen. 1:24) does not exclude the idea of mediate creation, through natural generation, so the forming of man “of the dust of the ground” (Gen. 2:7) does not in itself determine whether the creation of man's body was mediate or immediate.

We may believe that man sustained to the highest preceding brute the same relation which the multiplied bread and fish sustained to the five loaves and two fishes (Mat. 14:19), or which the wine sustained to the water which was transformed at Cana (John 2:7-10), or which the multiplied oil sustained to the original oil in the O. T. miracle (2 K. 4:1-7). The “dust,” before the breathing of the spirit into it, may have been animated dust. Natural means may have been used, so far as they would go. Sterrett, Reason and Authority in Religion, 39—“Our heredity is from God, even though it be from lower forms of life, and our goal is also God, even though it be through imperfect manhood.”

[pg 466]

Evolution does not make the idea of a Creator superfluous, because evolution is only the method of God. It is perfectly consistent with a Scriptural doctrine of Creation that man should emerge at the proper time, governed by different laws from the brute creation yet growing out of the brute, just as the foundation of a house built of stone is perfectly consistent with the wooden structure built upon it. All depends upon the plan. An atheistic and undesigning evolution cannot include man without excluding what Christianity regards as essential to man; see Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 43-73. But a theistic evolution can recognize the whole process of man's creation as equally the work of nature and the work of God.

Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 42—“You are not what you have come from, but what you have become.” Huxley said of the brutes: “Whether from them or not, man is assuredly not of them.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:289—“The religious dignity of man rests after all upon what he is, not upon the mode and manner in which he has become what he is.” Because he came from a beast, it does not follow that he isa beast. Nor does the fact that man's existence can be traced back to a brute ancestry furnish any proper reason why the brute should become man. Here is a teleology which requires a divine Creatorship.

J. M. Bronson: “The theist must accept evolution if he would keep his argument for the existence of God from the unity of design in nature. Unless man is an end, he is an anomaly. The greatest argument for God is the fact that all animate nature is one vast and connected unity. Man has developed not from the ape, but away fromthe ape. He was never anything but potential man. He did not, as man, come into being until he became a conscious moral agent.” This conscious moral nature, which we call personality, requires a divine Author, because it surpasses all the powers which can be found in the animal creation. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, tells us that: 1. Mollusca learn by experience; 2. Insects and spiders recognize offspring; 3. Fishes make mental association of objects by their similarity; 4. Reptiles recognize persons; 5. Hymenoptera, as bees and ants, communicate ideas; 6. Birds recognize pictorial representations and understand words; 7. Rodents, as rats and foxes, understand mechanisms; 8. Monkeys and elephants learn to use tools; 9. Anthropoid apes and dogs have indefinite morality.

But it is definite and not indefinite morality which differences man from the brute. Drummond, in his Ascent of Man, concedes that man passed through a period when he resembled the ape more than any known animal, but at the same time declares that no anthropoid ape could develop into a man. The brute can be defined in terms of man, but man cannot be defined in terms of the brute. It is significant that in insanity the higher endowments of man disappear in an order precisely the reverse of that in which, according to the development theory, they have been acquired. The highest part of man totters first. The last added is first to suffer. Man moreover can transmit his own acquisitions to his posterity, as the brute cannot. Weismann, Heredity, 2:69—“The evolution of music does not depend upon any increase of the musical faculty or any alteration in the inherent physical nature of man, but solely upon the power of transmitting the intellectual achievements of each generation to those which follow. This, more than anything, is the cause of the superiority of men over animals—this, and not merely human faculty, although it may be admitted that this latter is much higher than in animals.” To this utterance of Weismann we would add that human progress depends quite as much upon man's power of reception as upon man's power of transmission. Interpretation must equal expression; and, in this interpretation of the past, man has a guarantee of the future which the brute does not possess.

(c) Psychology, however, comes in to help our interpretation of Scripture. The radical differences between man's soul and the principle of intelligence in the lower animals, especially man's possession of self-consciousness, general ideas, the moral sense, and the power of self-determination, show that that which chiefly constitutes him man could not have been derived, by any natural process of development, from the inferior creatures. We are compelled, then, to believe that God's “breathing into man's nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7), though it was a mediate creation as presupposing existing material in the shape of animal forms, was yet an immediate creation in the sense that only a divine reinforcement of the [pg 467] process of life turned the animal into man. In other words, man came not from the brute, but through the brute, and the same immanent God who had previously created the brute created also the man.

Tennyson, In Memoriam, XLV—“The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is pressed Against the circle of the breast, Has never thought that ‘this is I’: But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of ‘I’ and ‘me,’ And finds ‘I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch.’ So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As thro' the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined.” Fichte called that the birthday of his child, when the child awoke to self-consciousness and said “I.” Memory goes back no further than language. Knowledge of the ego is objective, before it is subjective. The child at first speaks of himself in the third person: “Henry did so and so.” Hence most men do not remember what happened before their third year, though Samuel Miles Hopkins, Memoir, 20, remembered what must have happened when he was only 23 months old. Only a conscious person remembers, and he remembers only as his will exerts itself in attention.

Jean Paul Richter, quoted in Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, 110—“Never shall I forget the phenomenon in myself, never till now recited, when I stood by the birth of my own self-consciousness, the place and time of which are distinct in my memory. On a certain forenoon, I stood, a very young child, within the house-door, and was looking out toward the wood-pile, as in an instant the inner revelation ‘I am I,’ like lightning from heaven, flashed and stood brightly before me; in that moment I had seen myself as I, for the first time and forever.”

Höffding, Outlines of Psychology, 3—“The beginning of conscious life is to be placed probably before birth.... Sensations only faintly and dimly distinguished from the general feeling of vegetative comfort and discomfort. Still the experiences undergone before birth perhaps suffice to form the foundation of the consciousness of an external world.” Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 282, suggests that this early state, in which the child speaks of self in the third person and is devoid of self-consciousness, corresponds to the brute condition of the race, before it had reached self-consciousness, attained language, and become man. In the race, however, there was no heredity to predetermine self-consciousness—it was a new acquisition, marking transition to a superior order of being.

Connecting these remarks with our present subject, we assert that no brute ever yet said, or thought, “I.” With this, then, we may begin a series of simple distinctions between man and the brute, so far as the immaterial principle in each is concerned. These are mainly compiled from writers hereafter mentioned.

1. The brute is conscious, but man is self-conscious. The brute does not objectify self. “If the pig could once say, ‘I am a pig,’ it would at once and thereby cease to be a pig.” The brute does not distinguish itself from its sensations. The brute has perception, but only the man has apperception, i. e., perception accompanied by reference of it to the self to which it belongs.

2. The brute has only percepts; man has also concepts. The brute knows white things, but not whiteness. It remembers things, but not thoughts. Man alone has the power of abstraction, i. e., the power of deriving abstract ideas from particular things or experiences.

3. Hence the brute has no language. “Language is the expression of general notions by symbols” (Harris). Words are the symbols of concepts. Where there are no concepts there can be no words. The parrot utters cries; but “no parrot ever yet spoke a true word.” Since language is a sign, it presupposes the existence of an intellect capable of understanding the sign,—in short, language is the effect of mind, not the cause of mind. See Mivart, in Brit. Quar., Oct. 1881:154-172. “The ape's tongue is eloquent in his own dispraise.” James, Psychology, 2:356—“The notion of a sign as such, and the general purpose to apply it to everything, is the distinctive characteristic of man.” Why do not animals speak? Because they have nothing to say, i. e., have no general ideas which words might express.

4. The brute forms no judgments, e. g., that this is like that, accompanied with belief. Hence there is no sense of the ridiculous, and no laughter. James, Psychology, 2:360—“The brute does not associate ideas by similarity.... Genius in man is the possession of this power of association in an extreme degree.”

5. The brute has no reasoning—no sense that this follows from that, accompanied by a feeling that the sequence is necessary. Association of ideas without judgment is the [pg 468]typical process of the brute mind, though not that of the mind of man. See Mind, 5:402-409, 575-581. Man's dream-life is the best analogue to the mental life of the brute.

6. The brute has no general ideas or intuitions, as of space, time, substance, cause, right. Hence there is no generalizing, and no proper experience or progress. There is no capacity for improvement in animals. The brute cannot be trained, except in certain inferior matters of association, where independent judgment is not required. No animal makes tools, uses clothes, cooks food, breeds other animals for food. No hunter's dog, however long its observation of its master, ever learned to put wood on a fire to keep itself from freezing. Even the rudest stone implements show a break in continuity and mark the introduction of man; see J. P. Cook, Credentials of Science, 14. “The dog can see the printed page as well as a man can, but no dog was ever taught to read a book. The animal cannot create in its own mind the thoughts of the writer. The physical in man, on the contrary, is only an aid to the spiritual. Education is a trained capacity to discern the inner meaning and deeper relations of things. So the universe is but a symbol and expression of spirit, a garment in which an invisible Power has robed his majesty and glory”; see S. S. Times, April 7, 1900. In man, mind first became supreme.

7. The brute has determination, but not self-determination. There is no freedom of choice, no conscious forming of a purpose, and no self-movement toward a predetermined end. The donkey is determined, but not self-determined; he is the victim of heredity and environment; he acts only as he is acted upon. Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 537-554—“Man, though implicated in nature through his bodily organization, is in his personality supernatural; the brute is wholly submerged in nature.... Man is like a ship in the sea—in it, yet above it—guiding his course, by observing the heavens, even against wind and current. A brute has no such power; it is in nature like a balloon, wholly immersed in air, and driven about by its currents, with no power of steering.” Calderwood, Philosophy of Evolution, chapter on Right and Wrong: “The grand distinction of human life is self-control in the field of action—control over all the animal impulses, so that these do not spontaneously and of themselves determine activity” [as they do in the brute]. By what Mivart calls a process of “inverse anthropomorphism,” we clothe the brute with the attributes of freedom; but it does not really possess them. Just as we do not transfer to God all our human imperfections, so we ought not to transfer all our human perfections to the brute, “reading our full selves in life of lower forms.” The brute has no power to choose between motives; it simply obeys motive. The necessitarian philosophy, therefore, is a correct and excellent philosophy for the brute. But man's power of initiative—in short, man's free will—renders it impossible to explain his higher nature as a mere natural development from the inferior creatures. Even Huxley has said that, taking mind into the account, there is between man and the highest beasts an “enormous gulf,” a “divergence immeasurable” and “practically infinite.”

8. The brute has no conscience and no religious nature. No dog ever brought back to the butcher the meat it had stolen. “The aspen trembles without fear, and dogs skulk without guilt.” The dog mentioned by Darwin, whose behavior in presence of a newspaper moved by the wind seemed to testify to “a sense of the supernatural,” was merely exhibiting the irritation due to the sense of an unknown future; see James, Will to Believe, 79. The bearing of flogged curs does not throw light upon the nature of conscience. If ethics is not hedonism, if moral obligation is not a refined utilitarianism, if the right is something distinct from the good we get out of it, then there must be a flaw in the theory that man's conscience is simply a development of brute instincts; and a reinforcement of brute life from the divine source of life must be postulated in order to account for the appearance of man. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 165-167—“Is the spirit of man derived from the soul of the animal? No, for neither one of these has self-existence. Both are self-differentiations of God. The latter is simply God's preparation for the former.” Calderwood, Evolution and Man's Place in Nature, 337, speaks of “the impossibility of tracing the origin of man's rational life to evolution from a lower life.... There are no physical forces discoverable in nature sufficient to account for the appearance of this life.” Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 186—“Man's place has been won by an entire change in the limitations of his psychic development.... The old bondage of the mind to the body is swept away.... In this new freedom we find the one dominant characteristic of man, the feature which entitles us to class him as an entirely new class of animal.”

[pg 469]

John Burroughs, Ways of Nature: “Animal life parallels human life at many points, but it is in another plane. Something guides the lower animals, but it is not thought; something restrains them, but it is not judgment; they are provident without prudence; they are active without industry; they are skilful without practice; they are wise without knowledge; they are rational without reason; they are deceptive without guile.... When they are joyful, they sing or they play; when they are distressed, they moan or they cry; ... and yet I do not suppose they experience the emotion of joy or sorrow, or anger or love, as we do, because these feelings in them do not involve reflection, memory, and what we call the higher nature, as with us. Their instinct is intelligence directed outward, never inward, as in man. They share with man the emotions of his animal nature, but not of his moral or æsthetic nature; they know no altruism, no moral code.” Mr. Burroughs maintains that we have no proof that animals in a state of nature can reflect, form abstract ideas, associate cause and effect. Animals, for instance, that store up food for the winter simply follow a provident instinct but do not take thought for the future, any more than does the tree that forms new buds for the coming season. He sums up his position as follows: “To attribute human motives and faculties to the animals is to caricature them; but to put us in such relation to them that we feel their kinship, that we see their lives embosomed in the same iron necessity as our own, that we see in their minds a humbler manifestation of the same psychic power and intelligence that culminates and is conscious of itself in man—that, I take it, is the true humanization.” We assent to all this except the ascription to human life of the same iron necessity that rules the animal creation. Man is man, because his free will transcends the limitations of the brute.

While we grant, then, that man is the last stage in the development of life and that he has a brute ancestry, we regard him also as the offspring of God. The same God who was the author of the brute became in due time the creator of man. Though man came through the brute, he did not come from the brute, but from God, the Father of spirits and the author of all life. Œdipus' terrific oracle: “Mayst thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art!” might well be uttered to those who believe only in the brute origin of man. Pascal says it is dangerous to let man see too clearly that he is on a level with the animals unless at the same time we show him his greatness. The doctrine that the brute is imperfect man is logically connected with the doctrine that man is a perfect brute. Thomas Carlyle: “If this brute philosophy is true, then man should go on all fours, and not lay claim to the dignity of being moral.” G. F. Wright, Ant. and Origin of Human Race, lecture IX—“One or other of the lower animals may exhibit all the faculties used by a child of fifteen months. The difference may seem very little, but what there is is very important. It is like the difference in direction in the early stages of two separating curves, which go on forever diverging.... The probability is that both in his bodily and in his mental development man appeared as a sport in nature, and leaped at once in some single pair from the plane of irrational being to the possession of the higher powers that have ever since characterized him and dominated both his development and his history.”

Scripture seems to teach the doctrine that man's nature is the creation of God. Gen. 2:7—“Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—appears, says Hovey (State of the Impen. Dead, 14), “to distinguish the vital informing principle of human nature from its material part, pronouncing the former to be more directly from God, and more akin to him, than the latter.” So in Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who stretcheth forth the heavens, and layeth the foundation of the earth, and formeth the spirit of man within him”—the soul is recognized as distinct in nature from the body, and of a dignity and value far beyond those of any material organism. Job 32:8—“there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding”; Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it.” A sober view of the similarities and differences between man and the lower animals may be found in Lloyd Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence. See also Martineau, Types, 2:65, 140, and Study, 1:180; 2:9, 13, 184, 350; Hopkins, Outline Study of Man, 8:23; Chadbourne, Instinct, 187-211; Porter, Hum. Intellect, 384, 386, 397; Bascom, Science of Mind, 295-305; Mansel, Metaphysics, 49, 50; Princeton Rev., Jan. 1881:104-128; Henslow, in Nature, May 1, 1879:21, 22; Ferrier, Remains, 2:39; Argyll, Unity of Nature, 117-119; Bib. Sac., 29:275-282; Max Müller, Lectures on Philos. of Language, no. 1, 2, 3; F. W. Robertson, Lectures on Genesis, 21; Le Conte, in Princeton Rev., May, 1884:238-261; Lindsay, Mind in Lower Animals; Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals; Fiske, The Destiny of Man.

[pg 470]

(d) Comparative physiology, moreover, has, up to the present time, done nothing to forbid the extension of this doctrine to man's body. No single instance has yet been adduced of the transformation of one animal species into another, either by natural or artificial selection; much less has it been demonstrated that the body of the brute has ever been developed into that of man. All evolution implies progress and reinforcement of life, and is unintelligible except as the immanent God gives new impulses to the process. Apart from the direct agency of God, the view that man's physical system is descended by natural generation from some ancestral simian form can be regarded only as an irrational hypothesis. Since the soul, then, is an immediate creation of God, and the forming of man's body is mentioned by the Scripture writer in direct connection with this creation of the spirit, man's body was in this sense an immediate creation also.

For the theory of natural selection, see Darwin, Origin of Species, 398-424, and Descent of Man, 2:368-387; Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 241-269, Man's Place in Nature, 71-138, Lay Sermons, 323, and art.: Biology, in Encyc. Britannica, 9th ed.; Romanes, Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution. The theory holds that, in the struggle for existence, the varieties best adapted to their surroundings succeed in maintaining and reproducing themselves, while the rest die out. Thus, by gradual change and improvement of lower into higher forms of life, man has been evolved. We grant that Darwin has disclosed one of the important features of God's method. We concede the partial truth of his theory. We find it supported by the vertebrate structure and nervous organization which man has in common with the lower animals; by the facts of embryonic development; of rudimentary organs; of common diseases and remedies; and of reversion to former types. But we refuse to regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the history of life, and that for the following reasons:

1. It gives no account of the origin of substance, nor of the origin of variations. Darwinism simply says that “round stones will roll down hill further than flat ones”(Gray, Natural Science and Religion). It accounts for the selection, not for the creation, of forms. “Natural selection originates nothing. It is a destructive, not a creative, principle. If we must idealize it as a positive force, we must think of it, not as the preserver of the fittest, but as the destroyer, that follows ever in the wake of creation and devours the failures; the scavenger of creation, that takes out of the way forms which are not fit to live and reproduce themselves” (Johnson, on Theistic Evolution, in Andover Review, April, 1884:363-381). Natural selection is only unintelligent repression. Darwin's Origin of Species is in fact “not the Genesis, but the Exodus, of living forms.” Schurman: “The survival of the fittest does nothing to explain the arrival of the fittest”; see also DeVries, Species and Varieties, ad finem. Darwin himself acknowledged that “Our ignorance of the laws of variation is profound.... The cause of each slight variation and of each monstrosity lies much more in the nature or constitution of the organism than in the nature of the surrounding conditions” (quoted by Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 280-301). Weismann has therefore modified the Darwinian theory by asserting that there would be no development unless there were a spontaneous, innate tendency to variation. In this innate tendency we see, not mere nature, but the work of an originating and superintending God. E. M. Caillard, in Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1893:873-881—“Spirit was the moulding power, from the beginning, of those lower forms which would ultimately become man. Instead of the physical derivation of the soul, we propose the spiritual derivation of the body.”

2. Some of the most important forms appear suddenly in the geological record, without connecting links to unite them with the past. The first fishes are the Ganoid, large in size and advanced in type. There are no intermediate gradations between the ape and man. Huxley, in Man's Place in Nature, 94, tells us that the lowest gorilla has a skull capacity of 24 cubic inches, whereas the highest gorilla has 34-½. Over against this, the lowest man has a skull capacity of 62; though men with less than 65 are invariably idiotic; the highest man has 114. Professor Burt G. Wilder of Cornell University: “The largest ape-brain is only half as large as the smallest normal human.” Wallace, Darwinism, 458—“The average human brain weighs 48 or 49 ounces; the average ape's brain is only 18 ounces.” The brain of Daniel Webster weighed 53 ounces; but Dr. [pg 471]Bastian tells of an imbecile whose intellectual deficiency was congenital, yet whose brain weighed 55 ounces. Large heads do not always indicate great intellect. Professor Virchow points out that the Greeks, one of the most intellectual of nations, are also one of the smallest-headed of all. Bain: “While the size of the brain increases in arithmetical proportion, intellectual range increases in geometrical proportion.”

Respecting the Enghis and Neanderthal crania, Huxley says: “The fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to me to take us appreciably nearer to that lower pithecoid form by the modification of which he has probably become what he is.... In vain have the links which should bind man to the monkey been sought: not a single one is there to show. The so-called Protanthropos who should exhibit this link has not been found.... None have been found that stood nearer the monkey than the men of to-day.” Huxley argues that the difference between man and the gorilla is smaller than that between the gorilla and some apes; if the gorilla and the apes constitute one family and have a common origin, may not man and the gorilla have a common ancestry also? We reply that the space between the lowest ape and the highest gorilla is filled in with numberless intermediate gradations. The space between the lowest man and the highest man is also filled in with many types that shade off one into the other. But the space between the highest gorilla and the lowest man is absolutely vacant; there are no intermediate types; no connecting links between the ape and man have yet been found.

Professor Virchow has also very recently expressed his belief that no relics of any predecessor of man have yet been discovered. He said: “In my judgment, no skull hitherto discovered can be regarded as that of a predecessor of man. In the course of the last fifteen years we have had opportunities of examining skulls of all the various races of mankind—even of the most savage tribes; and among them all no group has been observed differing in its essential characters from the general human type.... Out of all the skulls found in the lake-dwellings there is not one that lies outside the boundaries of our present population.” Dr. Eugene Dubois has discovered in the Post-pliocene deposits of the island of Java the remains of a preeminently hominine anthropoid which he calls Pithecanthropus erectus. Its cranial capacity approaches the physiological minimum in man, and is double that of the gorilla. The thigh bone is in form and dimensions the absolute analogue of that of man, and gives evidence of having supported a habitually erect body. Dr. Dubois unhesitatingly places this extinct Javan ape as the intermediate form between man and the true anthropoid apes. Haeckel (in The Nation, Sept. 15, 1898) and Keane (in Man Past and Present, 3), regard the Pithecanthropus as a “missing link.” But “Nature”regards it as the remains of a human microcephalous idiot. In addition to all this, it deserves to be noticed that man does not degenerate as we travel back in time. “The Enghis skull, the contemporary of the mammoth and the cave-bear, is as large as the average of to-day, and might have belonged to a philosopher.” The monkey nearest to man in physical form is no more intelligent than the elephant or the bee.

3. There are certain facts which mere heredity cannot explain, such for example as the origin of the working-bee from the queen and the drone, neither of which produces honey. The working-bee, moreover, does not transmit the honey-making instinct to its posterity; for it is sterile and childless. If man had descended from the conscienceless brute, we should expect him, when degraded, to revert to his primitive type. On the contrary, he does not revert to the brute, but dies out instead. The theory can give no explanation of beauty in the lowest forms of life, such as molluscs and diatoms. Darwin grants that this beauty must be of use to its possessor, in order to be consistent with its origination through natural selection. But no such use has yet been shown; for the creatures which possess the beauty often live in the dark, or have no eyes to see. So, too, the large brain of the savage is beyond his needs, and is inconsistent with the principle of natural selection which teaches that no organ can permanently attain a size unrequired by its needs and its environment. See Wallace, Natural Selection, 338-360. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Epoch, 242-301—“That man's bodily organization is in some way a development from some extinct member of the animal kingdom allied to the anthropoid apes is scarcely any longer susceptible of doubt.... But he is certainly not descended from any existing species of anthropoid apes.... When once mind became supreme, the bodily adjustment must have been rapid, if indeed it is not necessary to suppose that the bodily preparation for the highest mental faculties was instantaneous, or by what is called in nature a sport.”With this statement of Dr. Wright we substantially agree, and therefore differ from [pg 472]Shedd when he says that there is just as much reason for supposing that monkeys are degenerate men, as that men are improved monkeys. Shakespeare, Timon of Athens, 1:1:249, seems to have hinted the view of Dr. Shedd: “The strain of man's bred out into baboon and monkey.” Bishop Wilberforce asked Huxley whether he was related to an ape on his grandfather's or grandmother's side. Huxley replied that he should prefer such a relationship to having for an ancestor a man who used his position as a minister of religion to ridicule truth which he did not comprehend. “Mamma, am I descended from a monkey?” “I do not know, William, I never met any of your father's people.”

4. No species is yet known to have been produced either by artificial or by natural selection. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 323—“It is not absolutely proven that a group of animals having all the characters exhibited by species in nature has ever been originated by selection, whether artificial or natural”; Man's Place in Nature, 107—“Our acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis must be provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is wanting; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting.” Huxley has more recently declared that the missing proof has been found in the descent of the modern horse with one toe, from Hipparion with two toes, Anchitherium with three, and Orohippus with four. Even if this were demonstrated, we should still maintain that the only proper analogue was to be found in that artificial selection by which man produces new varieties, and that natural selection can bring about no useful results and show no progress, unless it be the method and revelation of a wise and designing mind. In other words, selection implies intelligence and will, and therefore cannot be exclusively natural. Mivart, Man and Apes, 192—“If it is inconceivable and impossible for man's body to be developed or to exist without his informing soul, we conclude that, as no natural process accounts for the different kind of soul—one capable of articulately expressing general conceptions,—so no merely natural process can account for the origin of the body informed by it—a body to which such an intellectual faculty was so essentially and intimately related.” Thus Mivart, who once considered that evolution could account for man's body, now holds instead that it can account neither for man's body nor for his soul, and calls natural selection “a puerile hypothesis” (Lessons from Nature, 300; Essays and Criticisms, 2:289-314).

(e) While we concede, then, that man has a brute ancestry, we make two claims by way of qualification and explanation: first, that the laws of organic development which have been followed in man's origin are only the methods of God and proofs of his creatorship; secondly, that man, when he appears upon the scene, is no longer brute, but a self-conscious and self-determining being, made in the image of his Creator and capable of free moral decision between good and evil.

Both man's original creation and his new creation in regeneration are creations from within, rather than from without. In both cases, God builds the new upon the basis of the old. Man is not a product of blind forces, but is rather an emanation from that same divine life of which the brute was a lower manifestation. The fact that God used preëxisting material does not prevent his authorship of the result. The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to his creation. Professor John H. Strong: “Some who freely allow the presence and power of God in the age-long process seem nevertheless not clearly to see that, in the final result of finished man, God successfully revealed himself. God's work was never really or fully done; man was a compound of brute and man; and a compound of two such elements could not be said to possess the qualities of either. God did not really succeed in bringing moral personality to birth. The evolution was incomplete; man is still on all fours; he cannot sin, because he was begotten of the brute; no fall, and no regeneration, is conceivable. We assert, on the contrary, that, though man came through the brute, he did not come from the brute. He came from God, whose immanent life he reveals, whose image he reflects in a finished moral personality. Because God succeeded, a fall was possible. We can believe in the age-long creation of evolution, provided only that this evolution completed itself. With that proviso, sin remains and the fall.” See also A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 163-180.

[pg 473]

An atheistic and unteleological evolution is a reversion to the savage view of animals as brethren, and to the heathen idea of a sphynx-man growing out of the brute. Darwin himself did not deny God's authorship. He closes his first great book with the declaration that life, with all its potencies, was originally breathed “by the Creator”into the first forms of organic being. And in his letters he refers with evident satisfaction to Charles Kingsley's finding nothing in the theory which was inconsistent with an earnest Christian faith. It was not Darwin, but disciples like Haeckel, who put forward the theory as making the hypothesis of a Creator superfluous. We grant the principle of evolution, but we regard it as only the method of the divine intelligence, and must moreover consider it as preceded by an original creative act, introducing vegetable and animal life, and as supplemented by other creative acts, at the introduction of man and at the incarnation of Christ. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 33—“What seemed to wreck our faith in human nature [its origin from the brute] has been its grandest confirmation. For nothing argues the essential dignity of man more clearly than his triumph over the limitations of his brute inheritance, while the long way that he has come is prophecy of the moral heights undreamed of that await his tireless feet.” All this is true if we regard human nature, not as an undesigned result of atheistic evolution, but as the efflux and reflection of the divine personality. R. E. Thompson, in S. S. Times, Dec. 29, 1906—“The greatest fact in heredity is our descent from God, and the greatest fact in environment is his presence in human life at every point.”

The atheistic conception of evolution is well satirized in the verse: “There was an ape in days that were earlier; Centuries passed and his hair became curlier; Centuries more and his thumb gave a twist, And he was a man and a Positivist.” That this conception is not a necessary conclusion of modern science, is clear from the statements of Wallace, the author with Darwin of the theory of natural selection. Wallace believes that man's body was developed from the brute, but he thinks there have been three breaks in continuity: 1. the appearance of life; 2. the appearance of sensation and consciousness; and 3. the appearance of spirit. These seem to correspond to 1. vegetable; 2. animal; and 3. human life. He thinks natural selection may account for man's place in nature, but not for man's place above nature, as a spiritual being. See Wallace, Darwinism, 445-478—“I fully accept Mr. Darwin's conclusion as to the essential identity of man's bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes.” But the conclusion that man's higher faculties have also been derived from the lower animals “appears to me not to be supported by adequate evidence, and to be directly opposed to many well-ascertained facts” (461).... The mathematical, the artistic and musical faculties, are results, not causes, of advancement,—they do not help in the struggle for existence and could not have been developed by natural selection. The introduction of life (vegetable), of consciousness (animal), of higher faculty (human), point clearly to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter is subordinate (474-476).... Man's intellectual and moral faculties could not have been developed from the animal, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can find an adequate cause only in the world of spirit.

Wallace, Natural Selection, 338—“The average cranial capacity of the lowest savage is probably not less than five-sixths of that of the highest civilized races, while the brain of the anthropoid apes scarcely amounts to one-third of that of man, in both cases taking the average; or the proportions may be represented by the following figures: anthropoid apes, 10; savages, 26; civilized man, 32.” Ibid., 360—“The inference I would draw from this class of phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided the development of man in a definite direction and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many animal and vegetable forms.... The controlling action of a higher intelligence is a necessary part of the laws of nature, just as the action of all surrounding organisms is one of the agencies in organic development,—else the laws which govern the material universe are insufficient for the production of man.” Sir Wm. Thompson: “That man could be evolved out of inferior animals is the wildest dream of materialism, a pure assumption which offends me alike by its folly and by its arrogance.” Hartmann, in his Anthropoid Apes, 302-306, while not despairing of “the possibility of discovering the true link between the world of man and mammals,”declares that “that purely hypothetical being, the common ancestor of man and apes, is still to be found,” and that “man cannot have descended from any of the fossil species which have hitherto come to our notice, nor yet from any of the species of apes now extant.” See Dana, Amer. Journ. Science and Arts, 1876:251, and Geology, 603, [pg 474]604; Lotze, Mikrokosmos, vol. I, bk. 3, chap. 1; Mivart, Genesis of Species, 202-222, 259-307, Man and Apes, 88, 149-192, Lessons from Nature, 128-242, 280-301, The Cat. and Encyclop. Britannica, art.: Apes; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, 64-87; Bp. Temple, Bampton Lect., 1884:161-189; Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 321-329; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 38-75; Asa Gray, Natural Science and Religion; Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 115-140; Carpenter, Mental Physiology, 59; McIlvaine, Wisdom of Holy Scripture, 55-86; Bible Commentary, 1:43; Martensen, Dogmatics, 136; LeConte, in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1878:776-803; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 81-105; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:499-515. Also, see this Compendium, pages 392, 393.

(f) The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin.

Texts referring to God's natural and common Fatherhood are: Mal. 2:10—“Have we not all one father [Abraham]? hath not one God created us?” Luke 3:38—“Adam, the son of God”; 15:11-32—the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father is father even before the prodigal returns; John 3:16—“God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son”; John 15:6—“If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned”;—these words imply a natural union of all men with Christ,—otherwise they would teach that those who are spiritually united to him can perish everlastingly. Acts 17:28—“For we are also his offspring”—words addressed by Paul to a heathen audience; Col. 1:16, 17—“in him were all things created ... and in him all things consist”; Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.” Fatherhood, in this larger sense, implies: 1. Origination; 2. Impartation of life; 3. Sustentation; 4. Likeness in faculties and powers; 5. Government; 6. Care; 7. Love. In all these respects God is the Father of all men, and his fatherly love is both preserving and atoning. God's natural fatherhood is mediated by Christ, through whom all things were made, and in whom all things, even humanity, consist. We are naturally children of God, as we were created in Christ; we are spiritually sons of God, as we have been created anew in Christ Jesus. G. W. Northrop: “God never becomesFather to any men or class of men; he only becomes a reconciled and complacentFather to those who become ethically like him. Men are not sons in the full ideal sense until they comport themselves as sons of God.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 39—“While God is the Father of all men, all men are not the children of God: in other words, God always realizes completely the idea of Father to every man; but the majority of men realize only partially the idea of sonship.”

Texts referring to the special Fatherhood of grace are: John 1:12, 13—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name; who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God”; Rom. 8:14—“for as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God”; 15—“ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father”; 2 Cor. 6:17—“Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you, and will be to you a Father, and ye shall be to me sons and daughters, saith the Lord Almighty”; Eph. 1:5, 6—“having foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto himself”; 3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every family [marg. “fatherhood”] in heaven and on earth is named” (= every race among angels or men—so Meyer, Romans, 158, 159); Gal 3:26—“for ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Christ Jesus”; 4:6—“And because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”; 1 John 3:1, 2—“Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God; [pg 475]and such we are.... Beloved, now are we children of God.” The sonship of the race is only rudimentary. The actual realization of sonship is possible only through Christ. Gal. 4:1-7 intimates a universal sonship, but a sonship in which the child “differeth nothing from a bondservant though he is lord of all,” and needs still to “receive the adoption of sons.” Simon, Reconciliation, 81—“It is one thing to be a father; another to discharge all the fatherly functions. Human fathers sometimes fail to behave like fathers for reasons lying solely in themselves; sometimes because of hindrances in the conduct or character of their children. No father can normally discharge his fatherly functions toward children who are unchildlike. So even the rebellious son is a son, but he does not act like a son.” Because all men are naturally sons of God, it does not follow that all men will be saved. Many who are naturally sons of God are not spiritually sons of God; they are only “servants”who “abide not in the house forever” (John 8:35). God is their Father, but they have yet to “become” his children (Mat. 5:45).

The controversy between those who maintain and those who deny that God is the Father of all men is a mere logomachy. God is physically and naturally the Father of all men; he is morally and spiritually the Father only of those who have been renewed by his Spirit. All men are sons of God in a lower sense by virtue of their natural union with Christ; only those are sons of God in the higher sense who have joined themselves by faith to Christ in a spiritual union. We can therefore assent to much that is said by those who deny the universal divine fatherhood, as, for example, C. M. Mead, in Am. Jour. Theology, July, 1897:577-600, who maintains that sonship consists in spiritual kinship with God, and who quotes, in support of this view, John 8:41-44—“If God were your Father, ye would love me.... Ye are of your father, the devil” = the Fatherhood of God is not universal; Mat. 5:44, 45—“Love your enemies ... in order that ye may become sons of your Father who is in heaven”; John 1:12—“as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.” Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 103—“That God has created all men does not constitute them his sons in the evangelical sense of the word. The sonship on which the N. T. dwells so constantly is based solely on the experience of the new birth, while the doctrine of universal sonship rests either on a daring denial or a daring assumption—the denial of the universal fall of man through sin, or the assumption of the universal regeneration of man through the Spirit. In either case the teaching belongs to ‘another gospel’ (Gal. 1:7), the recompense of whose preaching is not a beatitude, but an ‘anathema’ (Gal 1:8.)”

But we can also agree with much that is urged by the opposite party, as for example, Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:193—“God does not become the Father, but is the heavenly Father, even of those who become his sons.... This Fatherhood of God, instead of the kingship which was the dominant idea of the Jews, Jesus made the primary doctrine. The relation is ethical, not the Fatherhood of mere origination, and therefore only those who live aright are true sons of God.... 209—Mere kingship, or exaltation above the world, led to Pharisaic legal servitude and external ceremony and to Alexandrian philosophical speculation. The Fatherhood apprehended and announced by Jesus was essentially a relation of love and holiness.” A. H. Bradford, Age of Faith, 116-120—“There is something sacred in humanity. But systems of theology once began with the essential and natural worthlessness of man.... If there is no Fatherhood, then selfishness is logical. But Fatherhood carries with it identity of nature between the parent and the child. Therefore every laborer is of the nature of God, and he who has the nature of God cannot be treated like the products of factory and field.... All the children of God are by nature partakers of the life of God. They are called ‘children of wrath’ (Eph. 2:3), or ‘of perdition’ (John 17:12), only to indicate that their proper relations and duties have been violated.... Love for man is dependent on something worthy of love, and that is found in man's essential divinity.” We object to this last statement, as attributing to man at the beginning what can come to him only through grace. Man was indeed created in Christ (Col. 1:16) and was a son of God by virtue of his union with Christ (Luke 3:38; John 15:6). But since man has sinned and has renounced his sonship, it can be restored and realized. In a moral and spiritual sense, only through the atoning work of Christ and the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 2:10—“created in Christ Jesus for good works”; 2 Pet 1:4—“his precious and exceeding great promises; that through these ye may become partakers of the divine nature”).

Many who deny the universal Fatherhood of God refuse to carry their doctrine to its logical extreme. To be consistent they should forbid the unconverted to offer the Lord's Prayer or even to pray at all. A mother who did not believe God to be the Father of all actually said: “My children are not converted, and if I were to teach them the Lord's Prayer, I must teach them to say: ‘Our father who art in hell’; for [pg 476]they are only children of the devil.” Papers on the question: Is God the Father of all Men? are to be found in the Proceedings of the Baptist Congress, 1896:106-136. Among these the essay of F. H. Rowley asserts God's universal Fatherhood upon the grounds: 1. Man is created in the image of God; 2. God's fatherly treatment of man, especially in the life of Christ among men; 3. God's universal claim on man for his filial love and trust; 4. Only God's Fatherhood makes incarnation possible, for this implies oneness of nature between God and man. To these we may add: 5. The atoning death of Christ could be efficacious only upon the ground of a common nature in Christ and in humanity; and 6. The regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is intelligible only as the restoration of a filial relation which was native to man, but which his sin had put into abeyance. For denial that God is Father to any but the regenerate, see Candlish, Fatherhood of God; Wright, Fatherhood of God. For advocacy of the universal Fatherhood, see Crawford, Fatherhood of God; Lidgett, Fatherhood of God.

II. Unity of the Human Race.

(a) The Scriptures teach that the whole human race is descended from a single pair.

Gen. 1:27, 28—“And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it”; 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; 22—“and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”; 3:20—“And the man called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living” = even Eve is traced back to Adam; 9:19—“These three were the sons of Noah; and of these was the whole earth overspread.” Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 110—“Logically, it seems easier to account for the divergence of what was at first one, than for the union of what was at first heterogeneous.”

(b) This truth lies at the foundation of Paul's doctrine of the organic unity of mankind in the first transgression, and of the provision of salvation for the race in Christ.

Rom. 5:12—“Therefore, as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin; and so death passed unto all men, for that all sinned”; 19—“For as through the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, even so through the obedience of the one shall the many be made righteous”; 1 Cor. 15:21, 22—“For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive”; Heb. 2:16—“For verily not of angels doth he take hold, but he taketh hold of the seed of Abraham.” One of the most eminent ethnologists and anthropologists, Prof. D. G. Brinton, said not long before his death that all scientific research and teaching tended to the conviction that mankind has descended from one pair.

(c) This descent of humanity from a single pair also constitutes the ground of man's obligation of natural brotherhood to every member of the race.

Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth”—here the Rev. Vers. omits the word “blood” (“made of one blood”—Auth. Vers.). The word to be supplied is possibly “father,” but more probably “body”; cf. Heb. 2:11—“for both he that sanctifieth and they that are sanctified are all of one [father or body]: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren, saying, I will declare thy name unto my brethren, In the midst of the congregation will I sing thy praise.”

Winchell, in his Preadamites, has recently revived the theory broached in 1655 by Peyrerius, that there were men before Adam: “Adam is descended from a black race—not the black races from Adam.” Adam is simply “the remotest ancestor to whom the Jews could trace their lineage.... The derivation of Adam from an older human stock is essentially the creation of Adam.” Winchell does not deny the unity of the race, nor the retroactive effect of the atonement upon those who lived before Adam; he simply denies that Adam was the first man. 297—He “regards the Adamic stock as derived from an older and humbler human type,” originally as low in the scale as the present Australian savages.

Although this theory furnishes a plausible explanation of certain Biblical facts, such as the marriage of Cain (Gen. 4:17), Cain's fear that men would slay him (Gen. 4:14), and the distinction between “the sons of God” and “the daughters of men” (Gen. 6:1, 2), it treats the [pg 477]Mosaic narrative as legendary rather than historical. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, it is intimated, may have lived hundreds of years apart from one another (409). Upon this view, Eve could not be “the mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20), nor could the transgression of Adam be the cause and beginning of condemnation to the whole race (Rom. 5:12, 19). As to Cain's fear of other families who might take vengeance upon him, we must remember that we do not know how many children were born to Adam between Cain and Abel, nor what the age of Cain and Abel was, nor whether Cain feared only those that were then living. As to Cain's marriage, we must remember that even if Cain married into another family, his wife, upon any hypothesis of the unity of the race, must have been descended from some other original Cain that married his sister.

See Keil and Delitzsch, Com. on Pentateuch, 1:116—“The marriage of brothers and sisters was inevitable in the case of children of the first man, in case the human race was actually to descend from a single pair, and may therefore be justified, in the face of the Mosaic prohibition of such marriages, on the ground that the sons and daughters of Adam represented not merely the family but the genus, and that it was not till after the rise of several families that the bonds of fraternal and conjugal love became distinct from one another and assumed fixed and mutually exclusive forms, the violation of which is sin.” Prof. W. H. Green: “Gen. 20:12 shows that Sarah was Abraham's half-sister;...the regulations subsequently ordained in the Mosaic law were not then in force.” G. H. Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, has shown that marriage between cousins is harmless where there is difference of temperament between the parties. Modern palæontology makes it probable that at the beginning of the race there was greater differentiation of brothers and sisters in the same family than obtains in later times. See Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:275. For criticism of the doctrine that there were men before Adam, see Methodist Quar. Rev., April, 1881:205-231; Presb. Rev., 1881:440-444.

The Scripture statements are corroborated by considerations drawn from history and science. Four arguments may be briefly mentioned:

1. The argument from history.

So far as the history of nations and tribes in both hemispheres can be traced, the evidence points to a common origin and ancestry in central Asia.

The European nations are acknowledged to have come, in successive waves of migration, from Asia. Modern ethnologists generally agree that the Indian races of America are derived from Mongoloid sources in Eastern Asia, either through Polynesia or by way of the Aleutian Islands. Bunsen, Philos. of Universal History, 2:112—the Asiatic origin of all the North American Indians “is as fully proved as the unity of family among themselves.” Mason, Origins of Invention, 361—“Before the time of Columbus, the Polynesians made canoe voyages from Tahiti to Hawaii, a distance of 2300 miles.” Keane, Man Past and Present, 1-15, 349-440, treats of the American Aborigines under two primitive types: Longheads from Europe and Roundheads from Asia. The human race, he claims, originated in Indomalaysia and spread thence by migration over the globe. The world was peopled from one center by Pleistocene man. The primary groups were evolved each in its special habitat, but all sprang from a Pleiocene precursor 100,000 years ago. W. T. Lopp, missionary to the Eskimos, at Port Clarence, Alaska, on the American side of Bering Strait, writes under date of August 31, 1892: “No thaws during the winter, and ice blocked in the Strait. This has always been doubted by whalers. Eskimos have told them that they sometimes crossed the Strait on ice, but they have never believed them. Last February and March our Eskimos had a tobacco famine. Two parties (five men) went with dogsleds to East Cape, on the Siberian coast, and traded some beaver, otter and marten skins for Russian tobacco, and returned safely. It is only during an occasional winter that they can do this. But every summer they make several trips in their big wolf-skin boats—forty feet long. These observations may throw some light upon the origin of the prehistoric races of America.”

Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48—“The semi-civilized nations of Java and Sumatra are found in possession of a civilization which at first glance shows itself to have been borrowed from Hindu and Moslem sources.” See also Sir Henry Rawlinson, quoted in Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 156, 157; Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 223-236; Pickering, Races of Man, Introd., synopsis, and page 316; Guyot, Earth and Man, 298-334; Quatrefages, Natural History of Man, and Unité de l'Espèce Humaine; [pg 478]Godron, Unité de l'Espèce Humaine, 2:412 sq. Per contra, however, see Prof. A. H. Sayce: “The evidence is now all tending to show that the districts in the neighborhood of the Baltic were those from which the Aryan languages first radiated, and where the race or races who spoke them originally dwelt. The Aryan invaders of Northwestern India could only have been a late and distant offshoot of the primitive stock, speedily absorbed into the earlier population of the country as they advanced southward; and to speak of ‘our Indian brethren’ is as absurd and false as to claim relationship with the negroes of the United States because they now use an Aryan language.” Scribner, Where Did Life Begin? has lately adduced arguments to prove that life on the earth originated at the North Pole, and Prof. Asa Gray favors this view; see his Darwiniana, 205, and Scientific Papers, 2:152; so also Warren, Paradise Found; and Wieland, in Am. Journal of Science, Dec. 1903:401-430. Dr. J. L. Wortman, in Yale Alumni Weekly, Jan. 14, 1903:129—“The appearance of all these primates in North America was very abrupt at the beginning of the second stage of the Eocene. And it is a striking coincidence that approximately the same forms appear in beds of exactly corresponding age in Europe. Nor does this synchronism stop with the apes. It applies to nearly all the other types of Eocene mammalia in the Northern Hemisphere, and to the accompanying flora as well. These facts can be explained only on the hypothesis that there was a common centre from which these plants and animals were distributed. Considering further that the present continental masses were essentially the same in the Eocene time as now, and that the North Polar region then enjoyed a subtropical climate, as is abundantly proved by fossil plants, we are forced to the conclusion that this common centre of dispersion lay approximately within the Arctic Circle.... The origin of the human species did not take place on the Western Hemisphere.”

2. The argument from language.

Comparative philology points to a common origin of all the more important languages, and furnishes no evidence that the less important are not also so derived.

On Sanskrit as a connecting link between the Indo-Germanic languages, see Max Müller, Science of Language, 1:146-165, 326-342, who claims that all languages pass through the three stages: monosyllabic, agglutinative, inflectional; and that nothing necessitates the admission of different independent beginnings for either the material or the formal elements of the Turanian, Semitic, and Aryan branches of speech. The changes of language are often rapid. Latin becomes the Romance languages, and Saxon and Norman are united into English, in three centuries. The Chinese may have departed from their primitive abodes while their language was yet monosyllabic.

G. J. Romanes, Life and Letters, 195—“Children are the constructors of all languages, as distinguished from language.” Instance Helen Keller's sudden acquisition of language, uttering publicly a long piece only three weeks after she first began to imitate the motions of the lips. G. F. Wright, Man and the Glacial Period, 242-301—“Recent investigations show that children, when from any cause isolated at an early age, will often produce at once a language de novo. Thus it would appear by no means improbable that various languages in America, and perhaps the earliest languages of the world, may have arisen in a short time where conditions were such that a family of small children could have maintained existence when for any cause deprived of parental and other fostering care.... Two or three thousand years of prehistoric time is perhaps all that would be required to produce the diversification of languages which appears at the dawn of history.... The prehistoric stage of Europe ended less than a thousand years before the Christian Era.” In a people whose speech has not been fixed by being committed to writing, baby-talk is a great source of linguistic corruption, and the changes are exceedingly rapid. Humboldt took down the vocabulary of a South American tribe, and after fifteen years of absence found their speech so changed as to seem a different language.

Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:68 sq., denies the progress from lower methods of speech to higher, and declares the most highly developed inflectional languages to be the oldest and most widespread. Inferior languages are a degeneration from a higher state of culture. In the development of the Indo-Germanic languages (such as the French and the English), we have instances of change from more full and luxuriant expression to that which is monosyllabic or agglutinative. The theory of Max Müller is also opposed by Pott, Die Verschiedenheiten der menschlichen Rassen, [pg 479]202, 242. Pott calls attention to the fact that the Australian languages show unmistakable similarity to the languages of Eastern and Southern Asia, although the physical characteristics of these tribes are far different from the Asiatic.

On the old Egyptian language as a connecting link between the Indo-European and the Semitic tongues, see Bunsen, Egypt's Place, 1: preface, 10; also see Farrar, Origin of Language, 213. Like the old Egyptian, the Berber and the Touareg are Semitic in parts of their vocabulary, while yet they are Aryan in grammar. So the Tibetan and Burmese stand between the Indo-European languages, on the one hand, and the monosyllabic languages, as of China, on the other. A French philologist claims now to have interpreted the Yh-King, the oldest and most unintelligible monumental writing of the Chinese, by regarding it as a corruption of the old Assyrian or Accadian cuneiform characters, and as resembling the syllabaries, vocabularies, and bilingual tablets in the ruined libraries of Assyria and Babylon; see Terrien de Lacouperie, The Oldest Book of the Chinese and its Authors, and The Languages of China before the Chinese, 11, note; he holds to “the non-indigenousness of the Chinese civilization and its derivation from the old Chaldæo-Babylonian focus of culture by the medium of Susiana.”See also Sayce, in Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1884:934-936; also, The Monist, Oct. 1906:562-596, on The Ideograms of the Chinese and the Central American Calendars. The evidence goes to show that the Chinese came into China from Susiana in the 23d century before Christ. Initial G wears down in time into a Y sound. Many words which begin with Y in Chinese are found in Accadian beginning with G, as Chinese Ye, “night,” is in Accadian Ge, “night.” The order of development seems to be: 1. picture writing; 2. syllabic writing; 3. alphabetic writing.

In a similar manner, there is evidence that the Pharaonic Egyptians were immigrants from another land, namely, Babylonia. Hommel derives the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians from the pictures out of which the cuneiform characters developed, and he shows that the elements of the Egyptian language itself are contained in that mixed speech of Babylonia which originated in the fusion of Sumerians and Semites. The Osiris of Egypt is the Asari of the Sumerians. Burial in brick tombs in the first two Egyptian dynasties is a survival from Babylonia, as are also the seal-cylinders impressed on clay. On the relations between Aryan and Semitic languages, see Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 55-61; Murray, Origin and Growth of the Psalms, 7; Bib. Sac., 1870:162; 1876:352-380; 1879:674-706. See also Pezzi, Aryan Philology, 125; Sayce, Principles of Comp. Philology, 132-174; Whitney, art. on Comp. Philology in Encyc. Britannica, also Life and Growth of Language, 269, and Study of Language, 307, 308—“Language affords certain indications of doubtful value, which, taken along with certain other ethnological considerations, also of questionable pertinency, furnish ground for suspecting an ultimate relationship.... That more thorough comprehension of the history of Semitic speech will enable us to determine this ultimate relationship, may perhaps be looked for with hope, though it is not to be expected with confidence.” See also Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 199-222; Smith's Bib. Dict., art.: Confusion of Tongues.

We regard the facts as, on the whole, favoring an opposite conclusion from that in Hastings's Bible Dictionary, art.: Flood: “The diversity of the human race and of language alike makes it improbable that men were derived from a single pair.” E. G. Robinson: “The only trustworthy argument for the unity of the race is derived from comparative philology. If it should be established that one of the three families of speech was more ancient than the others, and the source of the others, the argument would be unanswerable. Coloration of the skin seems to lie back of climatic influences. We believe in the unity of the race because in this there are the fewest difficulties. We would not know how else to interpret Paul in Romans 5.” Max Müller has said that the fountain head of modern philology as of modern freedom and international law is the change wrought by Christianity, superseding the narrow national conception of patriotism by the recognition of all the nations and races as members of one great human family.

3. The argument from psychology.

The existence, among all families of mankind, of common mental and moral characteristics, as evinced in common maxims, tendencies and capacities, in the prevalence of similar traditions, and in the universal applicability of one philosophy and religion, is most easily explained upon the theory of a common origin.

[pg 480]

Among the widely prevalent traditions may be mentioned the tradition of the fashioning of the world and man, of a primeval garden, of an original innocence and happiness, of a tree of knowledge, of a serpent, of a temptation and fall, of a division of time into weeks, of a flood, of sacrifice. It is possible, if not probable, that certain myths, common to many nations, may have been handed down from a time when the families of the race had not yet separated. See Zöckler, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 8:71-90; Max Müller, Science of Language, 2:444-455; Prichard, Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:657-714; Smyth, Unity of Human Races, 236-240; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 2:77-91; Gladstone, Juventus Mundi.

4. The argument from physiology.

A. It is the common judgment of comparative physiologists that man constitutes but a single species. The differences which exist between the various families of mankind are to be regarded as varieties of this species. In proof of these statements we urge: (a) The numberless intermediate gradations which connect the so-called races with each other. (b) The essential identity of all races in cranial, osteological, and dental characteristics. (c) The fertility of unions between individuals of the most diverse types, and the continuous fertility of the offspring of such unions.

Huxley, Critiques and Addresses, 163—“It may be safely affirmed that, even if the differences between men are specific, they are so small that the assumption of more than one primitive stock for all is altogether superfluous. We may admit that Negroes and Australians are distinct species, yet be the strictest monogenists, and even believe in Adam and Eve as the primeval parents of mankind, i. e., on Darwin's hypothesis”; Origin of Species, 118—“I am one of those who believe that at present there is no evidence whatever for saying that mankind sprang originally from more than a single pair; I must say that I cannot see any good ground whatever, or any tenable evidence, for believing that there is more than one species of man.” Owen, quoted by Burgess, Ant. and Unity of Race, 185—“Man forms but one species, and differences are but indications of varieties. These variations merge into each other by easy gradations.”Alex. von Humboldt: “The different races of men are forms of one sole species,—they are not different species of a genus.”

Quatrefages, in Revue d. deux Mondes, Dec. 1860:814—“If one places himself exclusively upon the plane of the natural sciences, it is impossible not to conclude in favor of the monogenist doctrine.” Wagner, quoted in Bib. Sac., 19:607—“Species—the collective total of individuals which are capable of producing one with another an uninterruptedly fertile progeny.” Pickering, Races of Man, 316—“There is no middle ground between the admission of eleven distinct species in the human family and their reduction to one. The latter opinion implies a central point of origin.”

There is an impossibility of deciding how many races there are, if we once allow that there are more than one. While Pickering would say eleven, Agassiz says eight, Morton twenty-two, and Burke sixty-five. Modern science all tends to the derivation of each family from a single germ. Other common characteristics of all races of men, in addition to those mentioned in the text, are the duration of pregnancy, the normal temperature of the body, the mean frequency of the pulse, the liability to the same diseases. Meehan, State Botanist of Pennsylvania, maintains that hybrid vegetable products are no more sterile than are ordinary plants (Independent, Aug. 21, 1884).

E. B. Tylor, art.: Anthropology, in Encyc. Britannica: “On the whole it may be asserted that the doctrine of the unity of mankind now stands on a firmer basis than in previous ages.” Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication, 1:39—“From the resemblance in several countries of the half-domesticated dogs to the wild species still living there, from the facility with which they can be crossed together, from even half tamed animals being so much valued by savages, and from the other circumstances previously remarked on which favor domestication, it is highly probable that the domestic dogs of the world have descended from two good species of wolf (viz., Canis lupus and Canis latrans), and from two or three other doubtful species of wolves (namely, the European, Indian and North American forms); from at least one or two South American canine species; from several races or species of the jackal; and perhaps [pg 481]from one or more extinct species.” Dr. E. M. Moore tried unsuccessfully to produce offspring by pairing a Newfoundland dog and a wolf-like dog from Canada. He only proved anew the repugnance of even slightly separated species toward one another.

B. Unity of species is presumptive evidence of unity of origin. Oneness of origin furnishes the simplest explanation of specific uniformity, if indeed the very conception of species does not imply the repetition and reproduction of a primordial type-idea impressed at its creation upon an individual empowered to transmit this type-idea to its successors.

Dana, quoted in Burgess, Antiq. and Unity of Race, 185, 186—“In the ascending scale of animals, the number of species in any genus diminishes as we rise, and should by analogy be smallest at the head of the series. Among mammals, the higher genera have few species, and the highest group next to man, the orang-outang, has only eight, and these constitute but two genera. Analogy requires that man should have preëminence and should constitute only one.” 194—“A species corresponds to a specific amount or condition of concentrated force defined in the act or law of creation.... The species in any particular case began its existence when the first germ-cell or individual was created. When individuals multiply from generation to generation, it is but a repetition of the primordial type-idea.... The specific is based on a numerical unity, the species being nothing else than an enlargement of the individual.” For full statement of Dana's view, see Bib. Sac., Oct 1857:862-866. On the idea of species, see also Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 2:63-74.

(a) To this view is opposed the theory, propounded by Agassiz, of different centres of creation, and of different types of humanity corresponding to the varying fauna and flora of each. But this theory makes the plural origin of man an exception in creation. Science points rather to a single origin of each species, whether vegetable or animal. If man be, as this theory grants, a single species, he should be, by the same rule, restricted to one continent in his origin. This theory, moreover, applies an unproved hypothesis with regard to the distribution of organized beings in general to the very being whose whole nature and history show conclusively that he is an exception to such a general rule, if one exists. Since man can adapt himself to all climes and conditions, the theory of separate centres of creation is, in his case, gratuitous and unnecessary.

Agassiz's view was first published in an essay on the Provinces of the Animal World, in Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind, a book gotten up in the interest of slavery. Agassiz held to eight distinct centres of creation, and to eight corresponding types of humanity—the Arctic, the Mongolian, the European, the American, the Negro, the Hottentot, the Malay, the Australian. Agassiz regarded Adam as the ancestor only of the white race, yet like Peyrerius and Winchell be held that man in all his various races constitutes but one species.

The whole tendency of recent science, however, has been adverse to the doctrine of separate centres of creation, even in the case of animal and vegetable life. In temperate North America there are two hundred and seven species of quadrupeds, of which only eight, and these polar animals, are found in the north of Europe or Asia. If North America be an instance of a separate centre of creation for its peculiar species, why should God create the same species of man in eight different localities? This would make man an exception in creation. There is, moreover, no need of creating man in many separate localities; for, unlike the polar bears and the Norwegian firs, which cannot live at the equator, man can adapt himself to the most varied climates and conditions. For replies to Agassiz, see Bib. Sac., 19:607-632; Princeton Rev., 1862:435-464.

(b) It is objected, moreover, that the diversities of size, color, and physical conformation, among the various families of mankind, are inconsistent with the theory of a common origin. But we reply that these diversities are of a superficial character, and can be accounted for by corresponding [pg 482] diversities of condition and environment. Changes which have been observed and recorded within historic times show that the differences alluded to may be the result of slowly accumulated divergences from one and the same original and ancestral type. The difficulty in the case, moreover, is greatly relieved when we remember (1) that the period during which these divergences have arisen is by no means limited to six thousand years (see note on the antiquity of the race, pages 224-226); and (2) that, since species in general exhibit their greatest power of divergence into varieties immediately after their first introduction, all the varieties of the human species may have presented themselves in man's earliest history.

Instances of physiological change as the result of new conditions: The Irish driven by the English two centuries ago from Armagh and the south of Down, have become prognathous like the Australians. The inhabitants of New England have descended from the English, yet they have already a physical type of their own. The Indians of North America, or at least certain tribes of them, have permanently altered the shape of the skull by bandaging the head in infancy. The Sikhs of India, since the establishment of Bába Nának's religion (1500 A. D.) and their consequent advance in civilization, have changed to a longer head and more regular features, so that they are now distinguished greatly from their neighbors, the Afghans, Tibetans, Hindus. The Ostiak savages have become the Magyar nobility of Hungary. The Turks in Europe are, in cranial shape, greatly in advance of the Turks in Asia from whom they descended. The Jews are confessedly of one ancestry; yet we have among them the light-haired Jews of Poland, the dark Jews of Spain, and the Ethiopian Jews of the Nile Valley. The Portuguese who settled in the East Indies in the 16th century are now as dark in complexion as the Hindus themselves. Africans become lighter in complexion as they go up from the alluvial river-banks to higher land, or from the coast; and on the contrary the coast tribes which drive out the negroes of the interior and take their territory end by becoming negroes themselves. See, for many of the above facts, Burgess, Antiquity and Unity of the Race, 195-202.

The law of originally greater plasticity, mentioned in the text, was first hinted by Hall, the palæontologist of New York. It is accepted and defined by Dawson, Story of the Earth and Man, 360—“A new law is coming into view: that species when first introduced have an innate power of expansion, which enables them rapidly to extend themselves to the limit of their geographical range, and also to reach the limit of their divergence into races. This limit once reached, these races run on in parallel lines until they one by one run out and disappear. According to this law the most aberrant races of men might be developed in a few centuries, after which divergence would cease, and the several lines of variation would remain permanent, at least so long as the conditions under which they originated remained.” See the similar view of Von Baer in Schmid, Theories of Darwin, 55, note. Joseph Cook: Variability is a lessening quantity; the tendency to change is greatest at the first, but, like the rate of motion of a stone thrown upward, it lessens every moment after. Ruskin, Seven Lamps, 125—“The life of a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava-stream, first bright and fierce, then languid and covered, at last advancing only by the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks.” Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 54—“The further back we go into antiquity, the more closely does the Egyptian type approach the European.” Rawlinson says that negroes are not represented in the Egyptian monuments before 1500 B. C. The influence of climate is very great, especially in the savage state.

In May, 1891, there died in San Francisco the son of an interpreter at the Merchants' Exchange. He was 21 years of age. Three years before his death his clear skin was his chief claim to manly beauty. He was attacked by “Addison's disease,” a gradual darkening of the color of the surface of the body. At the time of his death his skin was as dark as that of a full-blooded negro. His name was George L. Sturtevant. Ratzel, History of Mankind, 1:9, 10—As there is only one species of man, “the reunion into one real whole of the parts which have diverged after the fashion of sports” is said to be “the unconscious ultimate aim of all the movements” which have taken place since man began his wanderings. “With Humboldt we can only hold fast to the external unity of the race.” See Sir Wm. Hunter, The Indian Empire, 223, 410; Encyc. Britannica, 12:808; 20:110; Zöckler, Urgeschichte, 109-132, and in Jahrbuch für deutsche [pg 483]Theologie, 8:51-71; Prichard, Researches, 5:547-552, and Nat. Hist. of Man, 2:644-656; Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 96-108; Smith, Unity of Human Races, 255-283; Morris, Conflict of Science and Religion, 325-385; Rawlinson, in Journ. Christ. Philosophy, April, 1883:359.

III. Essential Elements of Human Nature.

1. The Dichotomous Theory.

Man has a two-fold nature,—on the one hand material, on the other hand immaterial. He consists of body, and of spirit, or soul. That there are two, and only two, elements in man's being, is a fact to which consciousness testifies. This testimony is confirmed by Scripture, in which the prevailing representation of man's constitution is that of dichotomy.

Dichotomous, from δίχα, “in two,” and τέμνω, “to cut,” = composed of two parts. Man is as conscious that his immaterial part is a unity, as that his body is a unity. He knows two, and only two, parts of his being—body and soul. So man is the true Janus (Martensen), Mr. Facing-both-ways (Bunyan). That the Scriptures favor dichotomy will appear by considering:

(a) The record of man's creation (Gen. 2:7), in which, as a result of the inbreathing of the divine Spirit, the body becomes possessed and vitalized by a single principle—the living soul.

Gen. 2:7—“And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”—here it is not said that man was first a living soul, and that then God breathed into him a spirit; but that God inbreathed spirit, and man became a living soul = God's life took possession of clay, and as a result, man had a soul. Cf. Job 27:3—“for my life is yet whole in me, And the spirit of God is in my nostrils”; 32:8—“there is a spirit in man, And the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding”; 33:4—“The Spirit of God hath made me, And the breath of the Almighty giveth me life.”

(b) Passages in which the human soul, or spirit, is distinguished, both from the divine Spirit from whom it proceeded, and from the body which it inhabits.

Num. 16:22—“O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh”; Zech. 12:1—“Jehovah, who ... formeth the spirit of man within him”; 1 Cor. 2:11—“the spirit of the man which is in him ... the Spirit of God”; Heb. 12:9—“the Father of spirits.” The passages just mentioned distinguish the spirit of man from the Spirit of God. The following distinguish the soul, or spirit, of man from the body which it inhabits: Gen, 35:18—“it came to pass, as her soul was departing (for she died)”; 1 K. 17:21—“O Jehovah my God, I pray thee, let this child's soul come into him again”; Eccl. 12:7—“the dust returneth to the earth as it was, and the spirit returneth unto God who gave it”; James 2:26—“the body apart from the spirit is dead.”The first class of passages refutes pantheism; the second refutes materialism.

(c) The interchangeable use of the terms “soul” and “spirit.”

Gen. 41:8—“his spirit was troubled”; cf. Ps. 42:6—“my soul is cast down within me.” John 12:27—“Now is my soul troubled”; cf. 13:21—“he was troubled in the spirit.” Mat. 20:28—“to give his life (ψυχήν) a ransom for many”; cf. 27:50—“yielded up his spirit (πνεῦμα).” Heb. 12:23—“spirits of just men made perfect”; cf. Rev. 6:9—“I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God.” In these passages “spirit” and “soul” seem to be used interchangeably.

(d) The mention of body and soul (or spirit) as together constituting the whole man.

Mat 10:28—“able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; 1 Cor. 5:3—“absent in body but present in spirit”; 3 John 2—“I pray that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.” These texts imply that body and soul (or spirit) together constitute the whole man.

For advocacy of the dichotomous theory, see Goodwin, in Journ. Society Bib. Exegesis, 1881:73-86; Godet, Bib. Studies of the O. T., 32; Oehler, Theology of the O. T., 1:219; Hahn, Bib. Theol. N. T., 390 sq.; Schmid, Bib. Theology N. T., 503; Weiss, Bib. Theology N. T., 214; Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 112, 113; Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, [pg 484]1:294-298; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 1:549; 3:249; Harless, Com. on Eph., 4:23, and Christian Ethics, 22; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk. 1:164-168; Hodge, in Princeton Review, 1865:116, and Systematic Theol., 2:47-51; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:261-263; Wm. H. Hodge, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Apl. 1897.

2. The Trichotomous Theory.

Side by side with this common representation of human nature as consisting of two parts, are found passages which at first sight appear to favor trichotomy. It must be acknowledged that πνεῦμα (spirit) and ψυχή (soul), although often used interchangeably, and always designating the same indivisible substance, are sometimes employed as contrasted terms.

In this more accurate use, ψυχή denotes man's immaterial part in its inferior powers and activities;—as ψυχή, man is a conscious individual, and, in common with the brute creation, has an animal life, together with appetite, imagination, memory, understanding. Πνεῦμα, on the other hand, denotes man's immaterial part in its higher capacities and faculties;—as πνεῦμα, man is a being related to God, and possessing powers of reason, conscience, and free will, which difference him from the brute creation and constitute him responsible and immortal.

In the following texts, spirit and soul are distinguished from each other: 1 Thess. 5:23—“And the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved entire, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”; Heb. 4:12—“For the word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Compare 1 Cor. 2:14—“Now the natural [Gr. “psychical”] man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God”; 15:44—“It is sown a natural [Gr. “psychical”] body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural [Gr. “psychical”] body, there is also a spiritual body”; Eph. 4:23—“that ye be renewed in the spirit of your mind”; Jude 19—“sensual [Gr. “psychical”], having not the Spirit.”

For the proper interpretation of these texts, see note on the next page. Among those who cite them as proofs of the trichotomous theory (trichotomous, from τρίχα, “in three parts,” and τέμνω, “to cut,” = composed of three parts, i. e., spirit, soul, and body) may be mentioned Olshausen, Opuscula, 134, and Com. on 1 Thess., 5:23; Beck, Biblische Seelenlehre, 81; Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology, 117, 118; Göschel, in Herzog, Realencyclopädie, art.: Seele; also, art. by Auberlen: Geist des Menschen; Cremer, N. T. Lexicon, on πνεῦμα and ψυχή; Usteri, Paulin. Lehrbegriff, 384 sq.; Neander, Planting and Training, 394; Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, 365, 366; Boardman, in Bap. Quarterly, 1:177, 325, 428; Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man, 62-114; Ellicott, Destiny of the Creature, 106-125.

The element of truth in trichotomy is simply this, that man has a triplicity of endowment, in virtue of which the single soul has relations to matter, to self, and to God. The trichotomous theory, however, as it is ordinarily defined, endangers the unity and immateriality of our higher nature, by holding that man consists of three substances, or three component parts—body, soul and spirit—and that soul and spirit are as distinct from each other as are soul and body.

The advocates of this view differ among themselves as to the nature of the ψυχή and its relation to the other elements of our being; some (as Delitzsch) holding that the ψυχή is an efflux of the πνεῦμα, distinct in substance, but not in essence, even as the divine Word is distinct from God, while yet he is God; others (as Göschel) regarding the ψυχή, not as a distinct substance, but as a resultant of the union of the πνεῦμα and the σῶμα. Still others (as Cremer) hold the ψυχή to be the subject of the personal life whose principle is the πνεῦμα. Heard, Tripartite Nature of Man, 103—“God is the Creator ex traduce of the animal and intellectual part of every man.... Not so with the spirit.... It proceeds from God, not by creation, but by emanation.”

[pg 485]

We regard the trichotomous theory as untenable, not only for the reasons already urged in proof of the dichotomous theory, but from the following additional considerations:

(a) Πνεῦμα, as well as ψυχή, is used of the brute creation.

Eccl. 3:21—“Who knoweth the spirit of man, whether it goeth [marg. “that goeth”] upward, and the spirit of the beast, whether it goeth [marg. “that goeth”] downward to the earth?” Rev. 16:3—“And the second poured out his bowl into the sea; and it became blood, as of a dead man; and every living soul died, even the things that were in the sea” = the fish.

(b) ψυχή is ascribed to Jehovah.

Amos 6:8—“The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by himself” (lit. “by his soul”) lxx 42:1—“my chosen in whom my soul delighteth”; Jer. 9:9—“Shall I not visit them for these things? saith Jehovah; shall not my soul be avenged?” Heb. 10:38—“my righteous one shall live by faith: And if he shrink back, my soul hath no pleasure in him.”

(c) The disembodied dead are called ψυχαί.

Rev. 6:9—“I saw underneath the altar the souls of them that had been slain for the word of God”; cf. 20:4—“souls of them that had been beheaded.”

(d) The highest exercises of religion are attributed to the ψυχή.

Mark 12:30—“thou shalt love the Lord thy God ... with all thy soul”; Luke 1:46—“My soul doth magnify the Lord”; Heb. 6:18, 19—“the hope set before us: which we have as an anchor of the soul”; James 1:21—“the implanted word, which is able to save your souls.”

(e) To lose this ψυχή is to lose all.