realities. It will come only with a flood-tide of heavenly influences setting in on the hearts of ministers and churches, and bringing them up to a nobler type of piety. It must be looked for, therefore, in answers to prayer, in the far-reaching revival of religion through rich outpourings of the Spirit, and in more hearty and resolute personal self-sacrifice and self-devotion. Christian reader, rest not till your own heart glows as if with seraphic fire. RAY PALMER, D.D.

The Antiquity of Man.

ASIDE from the sublime rationality of the Biblical narrative of creation, the harmony and integrity of our Christian theology demand that we receive the opening of Genesis, with its account of the first man, as we do the opening of Matthew, with its story of the birth and conception of the Second Adam, or the opening of John, with its announcement of the Incarnate Word. It has been thought best, nevertheless, to treat this subject of the early humanity solely on the grounds afforded by the voice or silence of secular history. Everything goes to show that there was something great in the beginning of the present Adamic race. There is a distinct separation between it and the dark pre-historical. Whether we estimate its date at 2,500, or 3,000, or 4,000 years before Christ, it opens splendidly. We are presented with a picture of a human race, very strong, very majestic, and possessed by a vast ambition; very wicked, too, it must be confessed, but with a religious line of contemplative theosophists, standing apart from the rest, and devoutly "walking with God."

History begins with man doing great things. The first we know of him he is founding empires, building cities, quarrying granite stones for memorial pyramids, hewing from the rocks colossal human forms of awful sublimity, laying the foundations of vast and solemn temples, or of heavenward-soaring Babel towers. As though with a consciousness of having emerged not long before from the darkness of an antepast eternity, they seem determined that their historical memory shall never again perish from the earth. An awful impression has been made upon them by a late diluvial catastrophe. As pictured on the Assyrian tablets, it seems to stand like a dark curtain drawn before the frontal gates of their historical memory, and closing the view to all but a few glimpses of a brief primeval state, with its transient vision of a lost Paradise. They would make themselves independent of Heaven, as the human race has ever since been striving to do, though in less heroic ways. These early men would accomplish it by sheer boldness and strength. Titan-like they would reach the skies and be as gods—an idea very unscientific indeed, but still evidence of a great humanity. There is nothing like it in the pre-savageism of the geological ages or in the ever-sinking post-savageism of modern times.

Another feature of this new-born humanity is most significant. They claimed to be heaven-descended, they were bené Elohim, "Sons of God," or "Sons of the gods"; they were doveveîs, "Divine born"; they had been inspired by a heavenly breath, a Divine spark had mingled with their clay. It manifests a consciousness, from whatever source derived, of superhuman origin-a tradition, to say the least, of man's recent introduction upon the earth.

These things, thus showing themselves in the very frontispiece of history, do not favour the idea of any such slow rise as we have before alluded to, or of any inclined plane, steep or gradual, by which the transition was made. No less opposed to it is the evidence of language. Here too are these unmistakable signs of abruptness, of sudden formation, of early finish, of unyielding permanence in the spiritual structure of certain very early tongues,

maintaining itself against the ceaseless flowing of the mere vocal elements. There are, moreover, the wonderful classifications of language, found most fresh and vital in their primitive stages as known to us, resisting alike the decomposition to which savageism is ever tending and the disarrangement of ideas that comes from the confusing copiousness of an unsound civilization. They stand first in human speech. They are before words. The things to be named, whether sensible or spiritual, were to be classified, set in some kind of order before the mind, in order that names might be given to them. What wisdom helped man here? However slightingly some eminent philologists may treat it, this is, indeed, the great mystery of language. The universal must in some way have preceded the particular at its earliest formation. Words are names of thoughts, of what we think about things, rather than of things themselves, or of objects as individual. When this distinction between the general and the particular first dawns upon the soul then speech begins. It can properly have no stages. Whether, therefore, we take Adam as generic or as denoting a primus homo, there was a time

"When man to reason woke from clay"—

when that which was "psychical," animal, "of the earth earthy," first became pneumatical or a true spiritual being. It is then, it may be said, that Nature wakes with him. In that first supersensual light "it is transformed as clay by the seal (Job xxxviii. 14), and stands forth as a garment." The tapestry

is turned. Its upper side is shown, and now, instead of the ragged threads sticking out, without form or order, there present themselves the glorious figures. In other words, Nature puts on a new face. Instead of a chaos of unrelated things, as they seem to the animal gaze, there now appear ideas, forms significant, universals, binding together the confused individualities and giving them a meaning. There is seen everywhere the unum in multis, the one in many, which is the real thing, making things to be truly things, realities, objects of thought-of spiritual perception. These are the things about which we wish to talk and for which we need the divine gift of rational speech. Whence came this new classifying instinct? To such question we can only answer in the formula of the pious Mussulman: "God knows.' Had not something visited us from above, no mere gazing on individual things would have ever raised itself to a higher plane of contemplation.

The theory of slow and imperceptible ascent cannot explain the difficulties that confront us. Such a rise, however small the angle, must have had a beginning somewhere, and this could only have been some essential change in the then human status. Why has man alone thus moved on, after remaining so long stationary? Why have not some others of his old bestial associates also taken a start and made history? Why have they never spoken? As far as the organs of articulation are concerned, if nothing else were lacking, the bull, with his strong, flexible tongue and his resounding palatal roof, far excels man. With what roaring gutturals, with what sonorous labials, with what an ore retundo of taurine eloquence would he talk to us, could he see in Nature what man beholds? Somewhere comes in the supernatural, and, as far as the theological wonder is concerned, it matters little where we place it.

The change must have been sudden, for any movement may be so called as estimated from such a standpoint of incalculable ages. Logically, the difference is as nothing. The great clock of eternity strikes, at last, the hour. The command is given, the word goes forth, and the grand march begins. Let us not cheat ourselves with names. Wherein would such a movement be less wonderful, less suggestive of a higher plane of power from whence a higher agent had waited its time than anything we may call a creation or renovation made about 6,000 years ago?

Attention has been mainly confined to two early nations, the Assyrian and the Egyptian. There are two others in some most important respects still more worthy of our notice, though seemingly of less account territorially. Of one of these, the Jews, the Abrahamic, or the purer Shemitic, there is no need of speaking here more specially. Of the Phoenicians it may be said that, though not appearing in history quite as early as the peoples on the Nile or the Euphrates, they are coeval with those first accounts of human doings that link themselves, without any decided historical break, with the events of our own day. According to the tradition related by themselves to Herodotus, their most ancient station was on the shores of the Persian Gulf, or near that early camp of Shinar whence parted the great streams of human migration-all of them, at least, that took a southern and westerly direction. Thence, following some intimation of a more convenient channel for their commercial instincts, they pass, by some unknown route, to the head of the Mediterranean : 66 the Entry of the Sea," the Prophet Ezekiel calls it, "the Mart of the Peoples for the many Isles." They are the first to venture on ships and traverse the wayless deep. Here was a new thing upon this old earth. The geological man had never dreamed of such a daring deed. Ages had passed away, but the sight of the ocean had roused in him no interest, no curiosity, no emotion, no vocal expression, save, perhaps, some wild savage shout of wonder, like the dog's "baying the moon or

"The wolf's long howl from Onalaska's shore."

From the edges of the dark forest or from the lofty promontories had he looked forth upon the wide waters, spreading out before his idealess sense, or upon the dim, distant, shadowy isle, with its attractive interest, so alluring to an onward movement, so full of an awakening power for beings with an instinctive desire to pierce the boundaries of the unknown. It was some such far-off vision of Cyprus, as seen by the Adamic man from the coast of Palestine, that gave a start to that early western movement which has so steadily gone on, unchecked by the wide Atlantic, and reaching even to our day. But no such interest had ever led this prehistoric savage to trust himself amid the stormy waves. Heroism, romance, adventure, were to him feelings and ideas unknown. Such thoughts might as soon have occurred to the hyena or the bear. From the earliest period at which the Mediterranean had received anything like the configuration it now holds had it flowed on, connecting islands, capes, and mainlands, presenting the most tempting means of communication to beings capable of turning to account such advantages; but no "sea-wandering, flaxen-winged cars of the deep," as the Greek poet so pictorially describes them, had ever whitened its inter

winding waters. No commerce had ever given animation to its lonely shores. A cheerless solitude had brooded o'er its surface, tossed, indeed, by many a tempest, but, as far as any living intercourse was concerned, as silent as those wan plains of our sad satellite to which the earliest scientific conjecture gave the name of seas. How quickly was this appearance transformed by the bold pioneering "Sons of Javan," on their early way to Ionia and the regions beyond; whilst the Phoenicians, still retaining their domicile at "the Entry of the Sea," immediately followed, and even outstripped them with their commerce! Most rapid must have been the commencement of a movement still felt after thousands of years, though all the centuries that have intervened, even to the present time, are but as yesterday in comparison with the uneventful, unhistoric ages during which the wretched troglodyte, whom some pronounce our ancestor, stretched out his aimless, unprogressive existence upon earth.

"By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands." The graphic language of the old account is instinct with the feelings of newness and rapidity. Still we cannot help acknowledging its naturalness. It has always been so. The movement of the human world, thus initiated, has ever had its alternating starts, its rapidly-executing fits of impulse. Peoples, like individuals, do more, lice more, sometimes, in periods comparatively brief than at others in the longest times that lack the stimulating influence or the energetic human material. The keeping this thought in mind would greatly modify our views in respect to certain alleged chronological intervals, their sufficiency or insufficiency for the quantity of historical action assigned to them. Even in our own more modern history there are such rousing periods. We would have called them mythical had they been more remotely parted from us, and would have looked upon their alleged heroic actors as we regard "the giants," the Nephilim, or "distinguished men," the anshé shem, or "men of renown" of the old Scriptures. If the early migrations were very rapid, so have been later epochs of adventure and discovery. The "Middle Ages" had gone back in their geography. The map of "the Venerable Bede" contains less than that of Ptolemy. Pliny knew more of the world than professors in the Sorbonne. But in forty years after the inspiration imparted to Columbus had given its new impulse to the age Cape Horn had been doubled, the globe circumnavigated, and the isles of the Pacific added to our knowledge. It was because God's time for it had come. Now, the early founding of the Egyptian state so soon after the Flood was not more wonderful than this, and, in view of it, even the shorter Hebrew chronology becomes the more credible reckoning. They were "giants" in those days. It all depends upon our estimate of this early humanity. Such low savages as are arbitrarily painted by Lubbock never could have done it. They would not have accomplished it even to this day. The standard, however, has no application to men like those that appear in the Hebrew Scriptures or on the most ancient monuments-Egyptian, Babylonian, or Assyrian. TAYLOR LEWIS, LL.D.