To talk of physiology is mere nonsense, because physiology can only examine man as he is-a state which scripture and all men pronounce to be that of mortality. What he was is the question; and of this I apprehend a dissecting infidel surgeon is about as ignorant as his neighbors; and more so than many, if he supposes that the God who created man could not sustain him in a present immortal condition. No creature can subsist per se, that is, independently of God. God had constituted man not dying, and then sentenced him to be a dying creature as he is. Why is "wear and tear" (Phases, p. 113) essential to life? Now it is, no doubt; but this is not essential to life, but to man's present state of life. The Paradisiacal state is mentioned by Plato in a curious passage. He says, "They lived naked in a state of happiness, and had an abundance of fruits, which were produced without the labor of agriculture, and men and beasts could then converse together. But these things we must pass over, until there appear some one to interpret them to us."
It is certainly remarkable, how everything in the Mosaic history is preserved, at least as disjecta membra, bits of truth amidst masses of error and superstition, corrupted into a mythological system by Egyptians, into a fabular system by Hesiod and Homer, into a monstrous system by Hindoos, but preserved. While Moses (who certainly did not derive it from extracting it by morsels from Híndoo, Egyptian, Grecian, and Mexican fables, or from Plato, who lived centuries after him) has given a concise, simple account of immense moral import, infinitely elevated above the whole range of the heathen fables which pervert its elements, placing the supreme God-man-good-evil-responsibility-grace-law-promise-the creatures-marriage, all in their place; which short statement accounts for all that we find dispersed over the whole world, of traditionary notions of the primeval history of man-so accounts for it, that with a little pains, we can trace all the fables to their source. How comes this? It is God's most brief but divine account of the whole matter, preserving by its very brevity its true character of the moral seed, so to speak, of all that has been afterward developed of good and evil. It was meant to be such and not more. The germ of all was there in that form. It is divinely given. With further details it would have lost this character. It would have had only its own moral consequences for the parties concerned, like other acts of individual men. But in the Mosaic account, creative goodness, the knowledge of good and evil, conscience, judgment, the way of the tree of life closed, and promise in the woman's seed given, all involving immense principles, are brought out. We see ourselves that the whole world is concerned in it, the immense drama of which angels and principalities and powers are the wondering spectators; and the conflict of good and evil, the moral of the tale, is opened with those in whose persons it was to be all developed; and the suggestion of His coming in grace and power, who would close, in the glorious triumph of good, putting down evil, what had begun in the solemn lessons of a lost paradise. But the drama was a reality; and all was involved in that one man and his failing companion. Yet from her who failed recovery was to spring, for grace was to be brought out and magnified (that is, God in His dealings with man) And these things angels desire to look into.
But Mr. N. will find faults if he can-old moral ones, for the old ones that depended on "science" are abandoned. We hear no more of the Zodiac of Dendera, or the millions of years of Hindoo chronology, or the more moderate thousands of Chinese dynasties. All these have disappeared before increased information. The Zodiac, on which the Volneys would found the ruin of revelation by its proofs of the long ante-Mosaic existence of the world, has been proved, by the discovery of the meaning of hieroglyphic symbols, to have been made in the reign of Augustus Caesar. The Indian eclipses are proved to have been calculated backwards, and the earliest observation to have been made not earlier than 700 years before Christ, that is, scarcely so early as Hezekiah's reign. And the time is known when all ancient books were destroyed in China, so that all is fable before. No history exists before the latter part of the history of the Jews: and, what is remarkable, all well-authenticated ancient history centers round that people.
Take Herodotus, and you will find that he has no nations with a history to tell you of but such as were in connection with the Jews-the Assyrians, Egyptians, and Babylonians, and such like -I name only the earliest. All the rest is vague and dark. Outside this we have some Chinese dynasties and some dark Hindoo traditions, which tend to confirm the early Mosaic accounts; and in monuments which no fraud could have reached. In Egypt, we have pictures of Jews making bricks under the lash; and, what is remarkable, we have evidently Jewish overseers, and besides them Egyptian directors, or head-overseers-exactly what is stated in the book of Exodus. For if infidelity can find doubts to stumble and fall upon, God has given to a simple faith what even externally confirms its confidence, and confounds the folly of the false science that will not believe. Such proofs are never the foundation of faith; they cheer and confirm it.
Remark another thing, that history groups itself also round exactly that center which Moses has made the cradle of mankind. While the peculiar people of God, placed at the point of contact of the three parts of the old world, formed the center field of active power, as they certainly did for Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, all are grouped round it; the hivings off of people in all directions are found to be from the center, in which Moses placed it. It was the real officina Gentium. So late as the barbarian inroads into the Roman empire, the invasions were in a great measure determined by advancing hordes from the east. In general, all languages and all records show that, from about Mesopotamia, and the country north of it, as a center, the world has been peopled. Though, of course, many of the movements are lost in the obscurity of ages, and secondary colonizations took place subsequently, as Hivites and Phoenicians peopling Greece and Africa, when driven out by Joshua, of which there is very ample evidence; and colonies from Egypt to Greece, and Greece to Italy; from Phenicia over the whole Mediterranean at least. But this only confirms the general fact, and that very strongly in some of its details. The Phoenicians went even to Ireland, and the first of May is still called in Irish, as pronounced, Boul tinne, that is, Baal teine, Baal's fire, teine meaning fire in the Celtic. I turn now to some other objections- the moral ones to which I have alluded.