A narrative of public affairs. It was at the beginning of the seventeenth century that this useful practice was suggested and established at Venice, at the time when Italy still continued the centre of European negotiations, and Venice was the unfailing asylum of liberty. The leaves or sheets containing this narrative, which were published once a week, were called "Gazettes," from the word "gazetta," the name of a small coin, amounting nearly to one of our demi-sous, then current at Venice. The example was afterwards followed in all the great cities of Europe.
Journals of this description have been established in China from time immemorial. The "Imperial Gazette" is published there every day by order of the court. Admitting this gazette to be true, we may easily believe it does not contain all that is true; neither in fact should it do so.
Théophraste Renaudot, a physician, published the first gazettes in France in 1601, and he had an exclusive privilege for the publication, which continued for a long time a patrimony to his family. The like privilege became an object of importance at Amsterdam, and the greater part of the gazettes of the United Provinces are still a source of revenue to many of the families of magistrates, who pay writers for furnishing materials for them. The city of London alone publishes more than twelve gazettes in the course of a week. They can be printed only upon stamped paper, and produce no inconsiderable income to the State.
The gazettes of China relate solely to that empire; those of the different states of Europe embrace the affairs of all countries. Although they frequently abound in false intelligence, they may nevertheless be considered as supplying good material for history; because, in general, the errors of each particular gazette are corrected by subsequent ones, and because they contain authentic copies of almost all state papers, which indeed are published in them by order of the sovereigns or governments themselves. The French gazettes have always been revised by the ministry. It is on this account that the writers of them have always adhered to certain forms and designations, with a strictness apparently somewhat inconsistent with the courtesies of polished society, bestowing the title of monsieur only on some particular descriptions of persons, and that of sieur upon others; the authors having forgotten that they were not speaking in the name of their king. These public journals, it must be added, to their praise, have never been debased by calumny, and have always been written with considerable correctness.
The case is very different with respect to foreign gazettes; those of London, with the exception of the court gazette, abound frequently in that coarseness and licentiousness of observation which the national liberty allows. The French gazettes established in that country have been seldom written with purity, and have sometimes been not a little instrumental in corrupting the language. One of the greatest faults which has found a way into them arises from the authors having concluded that the ancient forms of expression used in public proclamations and in judicial and political proceedings and documents in France, and with which they were particularly conversant, were analogous to the regular syntax of our language, and from their having accordingly imitated that style in their narrative. This is like a Roman historian's using the style of the law of the twelve tables.
In imitation of the political gazettes, literary ones began to be published in France in 1665; for the first journals were, in fact, simply advertisements of the works recently printed in Europe; to this mere announcement of publication was soon added a critical examination or review. Many authors were offended at it, notwithstanding its great moderation.
We shall here speak only of those literary gazettes with which the public, who were previously in possession of various journals from every country in Europe in which the sciences were cultivated, were completely overwhelmed. These gazettes appeared at Paris about the year 1723, under many different names, as "The Parnassian Intelligencer," "Observations on New Books," etc. The greater number of them were written for the single purpose of making money; and as money is not to be made by praising authors, these productions consisted generally of satire and abuse. They often contained the most odious personalities, and for a time sold in proportion to the virulence of their malignity; but reason and good taste, which are always sure to prevail at last, consigned them eventually to contempt and oblivion.
Many volumes have been written by learned divines in order to reconcile St. Matthew with St. Luke on the subject of the genealogy of Jesus Christ. The former enumerates only twenty-seven generations from David through Solomon, while Luke gives forty-two, and traces the descent through Nathan. The following is the method in which the learned Calmet solves a difficulty relating to Melchizedek: The Orientals and the Greeks, ever abounding in fable and invention, fabricated a genealogy for him, in which they give us the names of his ancestors. But, adds this judicious Benedictine, as falsehood always betrays itself, some state his genealogy according to one series, and others according to another. There are some who maintain that he descended from a race obscure and degraded, and there are some who are disposed to represent him as illegitimate.
This passage naturally applies to Jesus, of whom, according to the apostle, Melchizedek was the type or figure. In fact, the gospel of Nicomedes expressly states that the Jews, in the presence of Pilate, reproached Jesus with being born of fornication; upon which the learned Fabricius remarks, that it does not appear from any clear and credible testimony that the Jews directed to Jesus Christ during His life, or even to His apostles, that calumny respecting His birth which they so assiduously and virulently circulated afterwards. The Acts of the Apostles, however, inform us that the Jews of Antioch opposed themselves, blaspheming against what Paul spoke to them concerning Jesus; and Origen maintains that the passage in St. John's gospel "We are not born of fornication, we have never been in subjection unto any man" was an indirect reproach thrown out by the Jews against Jesus on the subject of His birth. For, as this father informs us, they pretended that Jesus was originally from a small hamlet of Judæa, and His mother nothing more than a poor villager subsisting by her labor, who, having been found guilty of adultery with a soldier of the name of Panther, was turned away by her husband, whose occupation was that of a carpenter; that, after this disgraceful expulsion, she wandered about miserably from one place to another, and was privately delivered of Jesus, who, pressed by the necessity of His circumstances, was compelled to go and hire Himself as a servant in Egypt, where He acquired some of those secrets which the Egyptians turn to so good an account, and then returned to His own country, in which, full of the miracles He was enabled to perform, He proclaimed Himself to be God.
According to a very old tradition, the name of Panther, which gave occasion to the mistake of the Jews, was, as we are informed by St. Epiphanius, the surname of Joseph's father, or rather, as is asserted by St. John Damascene, the proper name of Mary's grandfather.
As to the situation of servant, with which Jesus was reproached, He declares Himself that He came not to be served, but to serve. Zoroaster, according to the Arabians, had in like manner been the servant of Esdras. Epictetus was even born in servitude. Accordingly, St. Cyril of Jerusalem justly observed that it is no disgrace to any man.
On the subject of the miracles, we learn indeed from Pliny that the Egyptians had the secret of dyeing with different colors, stuffs which were dipped in the very same furnace, and this is one of the miracles which the gospel of the Infancy attributes to Jesus. But, according to St. Chrysostom, Jesus performed no miracle before His baptism, and those stated to have been wrought by Him before are absolute fabrications. The reason assigned by this father for such an arrangement is, that the wisdom of God determined against Christ's performing any miracles in His childhood, lest they should have been regarded as impostures.
Epiphanius in vain alleges that to deny the miracles ascribed by some to Jesus during His infancy, would furnish heretics with a specious pretext for saying that He became Son of God only in consequence of the effusion of the Holy Spirit, which descended upon Him at His baptism; we are contending here, not against heretics, but against Jews.
Mr. Wagenseil has presented us with a Latin translation of a Jewish work entitled "Toldos Jeschu," in which it is related that Jeschu, being at Bethlehem in Judah, the place of his birth, cried out aloud, "Who are the wicked men that pretend I am a bastard, and spring from an impure origin? They are themselves bastards, themselves exceedingly impure! Was I not born of a virgin mother? And I entered through the crown of her head!"
This testimony appeared of such importance to M. Bergier, that that learned divine felt no scruple about employing it without quoting his authority. The following are his words, in the twenty-third page of the "Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity": "Jesus was born of a virgin by the operation of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself frequently assured us of this with His own mouth; and to the same purpose is the recital of the apostles." It is certain that these words are only to be found in the "Toldos Jeschu"; and the certainty of that proof, among those adduced by M. Bergier, subsists, although St. Matthew applies to Jesus the passage of "Isaiah": "He shall not dispute, he shall not cry aloud, and no one shall hear his voice in the streets."
According to St. Jerome, there was in like manner an ancient tradition among the Gymnosophists of India, that Buddha, the author of their creed, was born of a virgin, who was delivered of him from her side. In the same manner was born Julius Cæsar, Scipio Africanus, Manlius, Edward VI. of England, and others, by means of an operation called by surgeons the Cæsarian operation, because it consists in abstracting the child from the womb by an incision in the abdomen of the mother. Simon, surnamed the Magician, and Manes both pretended to have been born of virgins. This might, however, merely mean, that their mothers were virgins at the time of conceiving them. But in order to be convinced of the uncertainty attending the marks and evidences of virginity, it will be perfectly sufficient to read the commentary of M. de Pompignan, the celebrated bishop of Puy en Velai, on the following passage in the Book of Proverbs: "There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not. The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and the way of a man in his youth." In order to give a literal translation of the passage, according to this prelate (in the third chapter of the second part of his work entitled "Infidelity Convinced by the Prophecies"), it would have been necessary to say, "Viam viri in virgine adolescentula"—The way of a man with a maid. The translation of our Vulgate, says he, substitutes another meaning, exact indeed and true, but less conformable to the original text. In short, he corroborates his curious interpretation by the analogy between this verse and the following one: "Such is the life of the adulterous woman, who, after having eaten, wipeth her mouth and saith, I have done no wickedness."
However this may be, the virginity of Mary was not generally admitted, even at the beginning of the third century. "Many have entertained the opinion and do still," said St. Clement of Alexandria, "that Mary was delivered of a son without that delivery producing any change in her person; for some say that a midwife who visited her after the birth found her to retain all the marks of virginity." It is clear that St. Clement refers here to the gospel of the conception of Mary, in which the angel Gabriel says to her, "Without intercourse with man, thou, a virgin, shalt conceive, thou, a virgin, shalt be delivered of a child, thou, a virgin, shalt give suck"; and also to the first gospel of James, in which the midwife exclaims, "What an unheard-of wonder! Mary has just brought a son into the world, and yet retains all the evidences of virginity." These two gospels were, nevertheless, subsequently rejected as apocryphal, although on this point they were conformable to the opinion adopted by the church; the scaffolding was removed after the building was completed.
What is added by Jeschu—"I entered by the crown of the head"—was likewise the opinion held by the church. The Breviary of the Maronites represents the word of the Father as having entered by the ear of the blessed woman. St. Augustine and Pope Felix say expressly that the virgin became pregnant through the ear. St. Ephrem says the same in a hymn, and Voisin, his translator, observes that the idea came originally from Gregory of Neocæsarea, surnamed Thaumaturgos. Agobar relates that in his time the church sang in the time of public service: "The Word entered through the ear of the virgin, and came out at the golden gate." Eutychius speaks also of Elian, who attended at the Council of Nice, and who said that the Word entered by the ear of the virgin, and came out in the way of childbirth. This Elian was a rural bishop, whose name occurs in Selden's published Arabic List of Fathers who attended the Council of Nice.
It is well known that the Jesuit Sanchez gravely discussed the question whether the Virgin Mary contributed seminally in the incarnation of Christ, and that, like other divines before him, he concluded in the affirmative. But these extravagances of a prurient and depraved imagination should be classed with the opinion of Aretin, who introduces the Holy Spirit on this occasion effecting his purpose under the figure of a dove; as mythology describes Jupiter to have succeeded with Leda in the form of a swan, or as the most eminent authors of the church—St. Austin, Athenagoras, Tertullian, St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Cyprian, Lactantius, St. Ambrose—and others believed, after Philo and Josephus, the historian, who were Jews, that angels had associated with the daughters of men, and engaged in sexual connection with them. St. Augustine goes so far as to charge the Manichæans with teaching, as a part of their religious persuasion, that beautiful young persons appeared in a state of nature before the princes of darkness, or evil angels, and deprived them of the vital substance which that father calls the nature of God. Herodius is still more explicit, and says that the divine majesty escaped through the productive organs of demons.
It is true that all these fathers believed angels to be corporeal. But, after the works of Plato had established the idea of their spirituality, the ancient opinion of a corporeal union between angels and women was explained by the supposition that the same angel who, in a woman's form, had received the embraces of a man, in turn held communication with a woman, in the character of a man. Divines, by the terms "incubus" and "succubus," designate the different parts thus performed by angels. Those who are curious on the subject of these offensive and revolting reveries may see further details in "Various Readings of the Book of Genesis," by Otho Gualter; "Magical Disquisitions," by Delvis, and the "Discourses on Witchcraft," by Henry Boguet.
No genealogy, even although reprinted in Moréri, approaches that of Mahomet or Mahommed, the son of Abdallah, the son of Abd'all Montaleb, the son of Ashem; which Mahomet was, in his younger days, groom of the widow Khadijah, then her factor, then her husband, then a prophet of God, then condemned to be hanged, then conqueror and king of Arabia; and who finally died an enviable death, satiated with glory and with love.
The German barons do not trace back their origin beyond Witikind; and our modern French marquises can scarcely any of them show deeds and patents of an earlier date than Charlemagne. But the race of Mahomet, or Mohammed, which still exists, has always exhibited a genealogical tree, of which the trunk is Adam, and of which the branches reach from Ishmael down to the nobility and gentry who at the present day bear the high title of cousins of Mahomet.
There is no difficulty about this genealogy, no dispute among the learned, no false calculations to be rectified, no contradictions to palliate, no impossibilities to be made possible.
Your pride cavils against the authenticity of these titles. You tell me that you are descended from Adam as well as the greatest prophet, if Adam was the common father of our race; but that this same Adam was never known by any person, not even by the ancient Arabs themselves; that the name has never been cited except in the books of the Jews; and that, consequently, you take the liberty of writing downfalseagainst the high and noble claims of Mahomet, or Mohammed.
You add that, in any case, if there has been a first man, whatever his name might be, you are a descendant from him as decidedly as Khadijah's illustrious groom; and that, if there has been no first man, if the human race always existed, as so many of the learned pretend, then you are clearly a gentleman from all eternity.
In answer to this you are told that you are a plebeian (roturier) from all eternity, unless you can produce a regular and complete set of parchments.
You reply that men are equal; that one race cannot be more ancient than another; that parchments, with bits of wax dangling to them, are a recent invention; that there is no reason that compels you to yield to the family of Mahomet, or to that of Confucius; or to that of the emperors of Japan; or to the royal secretaries of the grand college. Nor can I oppose your opinion by arguments, physical, metaphysical, or moral. You think yourself equal to the dairo of Japan, and I entirely agree with you. All that I would advise you is, that if ever you meet with him, you take good care to be the stronger.
The sacred writer having conformed himself to the ideas generally received, and being indeed obliged not to deviate from them, as without such condescension to the weakness and ignorance of those whom he addressed, he would not have been understood, it only remains for us to make some observations on the natural philosophy prevailing in those early periods; for, with respect to theology, we reverence it, we believe in it, and never either dispute or discuss it.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Thus has the original passage been translated, but the translation is not correct. There is no one, however slightly informed upon the subject, who is not aware that the real meaning of the word is, "In the beginning the gods madefirentorfitthe heaven and the earth." This reading, moreover, perfectly corresponds with the ancient idea of the Phœnicians, who imagined that, in reducing the chaos (chautereb) into order, God employed the agency of inferior deities.
The Phœnicians had been long a powerful people, having a theogony of their own, before the Hebrews became possessed of a few cantons of land near their territory. It is extremely natural to suppose that when the Hebrews had at length formed a small establishment near Phœnicia, they began to acquire its language. At that time their writers might, and probably did, borrow the ancient philosophy of their masters. Such is the regular march of the human mind.
At the time in which Moses is supposed to have lived, were the Phœnician philosophers sufficiently enlightened to regard the earth as a mere point in the compass with the infinite orbs placed by God in the immensity of space, commonly called heaven? The idea so very ancient, and at the same time so utterly false, that heaven was made for earth, almost always prevailed in the minds of the great mass of the people. It would certainly be just as correct and judicious for any person to suppose, if told that God created all the mountains and a single grain of sand, that the mountains were created for that grain of sand. It is scarcely possible that the Phœnicians, who were such excellent navigators, should not have had some good astronomers; but the old prejudices generally prevailed, and those old prejudices were very properly spared and indulged by the author of the Book of Genesis, who wrote to instruct men in the ways of God, and not in natural philosophy.
"The earth was without form (tohu bohu) and void; darkness rested upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the surface of the waters."
Tohu bohumeans precisely chaos, disorder. It is one of those imitative words which are to be found in all languages; as, for example, in the French we havesens dessus dessous, tintamarre, trictrac, tonnerre, bombe. The earth was not as yet formed in its present state; the matter existed, but the divine power had not yet arranged it. The spirit of God means literally the breath, the wind, which agitated the waters. The same idea occurs in the "Fragments" of the Phœnician author Sanchoniathon. The Phœnicians, like every other people, believed matter to be eternal. There is not a single author of antiquity who ever represented something to have been produced from nothing. Even throughout the whole Bible, no passage is to be found in which matter is said to have been created out of nothing. Not, however, that we mean to controvert the truth of such creation. It was, nevertheless, a truth not known by the carnal Jews.
On the question of the eternity of the world, mankind has always been divided, but never on that of the eternity of matter. From nothing, nothing can proceed, nor into nothing can aught existent return."De nihilo nihilum, et in nihilum nil posse gigni reverti."(Persius; Sat. iii.) Such was the opinion of all antiquity.
"God said let there be light, and there was light; and he saw that the light was good, and he divided the light from the darkness; and he called the light day, and the darkness night; and the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said also, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.... And he saw that it was good."
We begin with examining whether Huet, bishop of Avranches, Leclerc, and some other commentators, are not in the right in opposing the idea of those who consider this passage as exhibiting the most sublime eloquence.
Eloquence is not aimed at in any history written by the Jews. The style of the passage in question, like that of all the rest of the work, possesses the most perfect simplicity. If an orator, intending to give some idea of the power of God, employed for that purpose the short and simple expression we are considering, "He said, let there be light, and there was light," it would then be sublime. Exactly similar is the passage in one of the Psalms, "Dixit, et facta sunt"—"He spake, and they were made." It is a trait which, being unique in this place, and introduced purposely in order to create a majestic image, elevates and transports the mind. But, in the instance under examination, the narrative is of the most simple character. The Jewish writer is speaking of light just in the same unambitious manner as of other objects of creation; he expresses himself equally and regularly after every article, "and God saw that it was good." Everything is sublime in the course or act of creation, unquestionably, but the creation of light is no more so than that of the herbs of the field; the sublime is something which soars far from the rest, whereas all is equal throughout the chapter.
But further, it was another very ancient opinion that light did not proceed from the sun. It was seen diffused throughout the atmosphere, before the rising and after the setting of that star; the sun was supposed merely to give it greater strength and clearness; accordingly the author of Genesis accommodates himself to this popular error, and even states the creation of the sun and moon not to have taken place until four days after the existence of light. It was impossible that there could be a morning and evening before the existence of a sun. The inspired writer deigned, in this instance, to condescend to the gross and wild ideas of the nation. The object of God was not to teach the Jews philosophy. He might have raised their minds to the truth, but he preferred descending to their error. This solution can never be too frequently repeated.
The separation of the light from the darkness is a part of the same system of philosophy. It would seem that night and day were mixed up together, as grains of different species which are easily separable from each other. It is sufficiently known that darkness is nothing but the absence of light, and that there is in fact no light when our eyes receive no sensation of it; but at that period these truths were far from being known.
The idea of a firmament, again, is of the very highest antiquity. The heavens are imagined to be a solid mass, because they always exhibited the same phenomena. They rolled over our heads, they were therefore constituted of the most solid materials. Who could suppose that the exhalations from the land and sea supplied the water descending from the clouds, or compute their corresponding quantities? No Halley then lived to make so curious a calculation. The heavens therefore were conceived to contain reservoirs. These reservoirs could be supported only on a strong arch, and as this arch of heaven was actually transparent, it must necessarily have been made of crystal. In order that the waters above might descend from it upon the earth, sluices, cataracts, and floodgates were necessary, which might be opened and shut as circumstances required. Such was the astronomy of the day; and, as the author wrote for Jews, it was incumbent upon him to adopt their gross ideas, borrowed from other people somewhat less gross than themselves.
"God also made two great lights, one to rule the day, the other the night; He also made the stars."
It must be admitted that we perceive throughout the same ignorance of nature. The Jews did not know that the moon shone only with a reflected light. The author here speaks of stars as of mere luminous points, such as they appear, although they are in fact so many suns, having each of them worlds revolving round it. The Holy Spirit, then, accommodated Himself to the spirit of the times. If He had said that the sun was a million times larger than the earth, and the moon fifty times smaller, no one would have comprehended Him. They appear to us two stars of nearly equal size.
"God said, also, let us make man in our own image, and let him have dominion over the fishes."
What meaning did the Jews attach to the expression, "let us make man in our own image?" The same as all antiquity attached to it: "Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum." (Ovid, Metam. i. 82.)
No images are made but of bodies. No nation ever imagined a God without body, and it is impossible to represent Him otherwise. We may indeed say that God is nothing that we are acquainted with, but we can have no idea of what He is. The Jews invariably conceived God to be corporeal, as well as every other people. All the first fathers of the Church, also, entertained the same belief till they had embraced the ideas of Plato, or rather until the light of Christianity became more pure.
"He created them male and female." If God, of the secondary or inferior gods, created mankind, male and female, after their own likeness, it would seem in that case, as if the Jews believed that God and the gods who so formed them were male and female. It has been a subject of discussion, whether the author means to say that man had originally two sexes, or merely that God made Adam and Eve on the same day. The most natural meaning is that God formed Adam and Eve at the same time; but this interpretation involves an absolute contradiction to the statement of the woman's being made out of the rib of man after the seven days were concluded.
"And he rested on the seventh day." The Phœnicians, Chaldæans, and Indians, represented God as having made the world in six periods, which the ancient Zoroaster calls the six "Gahanbars," so celebrated among the Persians.
It is beyond all question that these nations possessed a theology before the Jews inhabited the deserts of Horeb and Sinai, and before they could possibly have had any writers. Many writers have considered it probable that the allegory of six days was imitated from that of the six periods. God may have permitted the idea to have prevailed in large and populous empires before he inspired the Jewish people with it. He had undoubtedly permitted other people to invent the arts before the Jews were in possession of any one of them.
"From this pleasant place a river went out which watered the garden, and thence it was divided into four rivers. One was called Pison, which compassed the whole land of Havilah, whence cometh gold.... the second was called Gihon and surrounds Ethiopia.... the third is the Tigris, and the fourth the Euphrates."
According to this version, the earthly paradise would have contained nearly a third part of Asia and of Africa. The sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris are sixty leagues distant from each other, in frightful mountains, bearing no possible resemblance to a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia, and which can be no other than the Nile, commences its course at the distance of more than a thousand leagues from the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; and, if the Pison means the Phasis, it is not a little surprising that the source of a Scythian river and that of an African one should be situated on the same spot. We must therefore look for some other explanation, and for other rivers. Every commentator has got up a paradise of his own.
It has been said that the Garden of Eden resembles the gardens of Eden at Saana in Arabia Felix, celebrated throughout all antiquity; that the Hebrews, a very recent people, might be an Arabian horde, and assume to themselves the honor of the most beautiful spot in the finest district of Arabia; and that they have always converted to their own purposes the ancient traditions of the vast and powerful nations in the midst of whom they were in bondage. They were not, however, on this account, the less under the divine protection and guidance.
"The Lord then took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden that he might cultivate it." It is very respectable and pleasant for a man to "cultivate his garden," but it must have been somewhat difficult for Adam to have dressed and kept in order a garden of a thousand leagues in length, even although he had been supplied with some assistants. Commentators on this subject, therefore, we again observe, are completely at a loss, and must be content to exercise their ingenuity in conjecture. Accordingly, these four rivers have been described as flowing through numberless different territories.
"Eat not of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil." It is not easy to conceive that there ever existed a tree which could teach good and evil, as there are trees that bear pears and apricots. And besides the question is asked, why is God unwilling that man should know good and evil? Would not his free access to this knowledge, on the contrary, appear—if we may venture to use such language—more worthy of God, and far more necessary to man? To our weak reason it would seem more natural and proper for God to command him to eat largely of such fruit; but we must bring our reason under subjection, and acquiesce with humility and simplicity in the conclusion that God is to be obeyed.
The Temptation of Adam (***Missing Image***)
"If thou shalt eat thereof, thou shalt die." Nevertheless, Adam ate of it and did not die; on the contrary, he is stated to have lived on for nine hundred and thirty years. Many of the fathers considered the whole matter as an allegory. In fact, it might be said that all other animals have no knowledge that they shall die, but that man, by means of his reason, has such knowledge. This reason is the tree of knowledge which enables him to foresee his end. This, perhaps, is the most rational interpretation that can be given. We venture not to decide positively.
"The Lord said, also, it is not good for man to be alone; let us make him a helpmeet for him." We naturally expect that the Lord is about to bestow on him a wife; but first he conducts before him all the various tribes of animals. Perhaps the copyist may have committed here an error of transposition.
"And the name which Adam gave to every animal is its true name." What we should naturally understand by the true name of an animal, would be a name describing all, or at least, the principal properties of its species. But this is not the case in any language. In each there are some imitative words, as "coq" and "cocu" in the Celtic, which bear some slight similarity to the notes of the cock and the cuckoo;tintamarre, trictrac, in French;alali, in Greek;lupus, in Latin, etc. But these imitative words are exceedingly few. Moreover, if Adam had thus thoroughly known the properties of various animals, he must either have previously eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or it would apparently have answered no end for God to have interdicted him from it. He must have already known more than the Royal Society of London, and the Academy of the Sciences.
It may be remarked that this is the first time the name of Adam occurs in the Book of Genesis. The first man, according to the ancient Brahmins, who were prodigiously anterior to the Jews, was called Adimo, a son of the earth, and his wife, Procris, life. This is recorded in the Vedas, in the history of the second formation of the world. Adam and Eve expressed perfectly the same meanings in the Phoenician language—a new evidence of the Holy Spirit's conforming Himself to commonly received ideas.
"When Adam was asleep God took one of his ribs and put flesh instead thereof; and of the rib which he had taken from Adam he formed a woman, and he brought the woman to Adam."
In the previous chapter the Lord had already created the male and the female; why, therefore, remove a rib from the man to form out of it a woman who was already in being? It is answered that the author barely announces in the one case what he explains in another. It is answered further that this allegory places the wife in subjection to her husband, and expresses their intimate union. Many persons have been led to imagine from this verse that men have one rib less than women; but this is a heresy, and anatomy informs us that a wife has no more ribs than her husband.
"But the serpent was more subtle than all animals on the earth; he said to the woman," etc. Throughout the whole of this article there is no mention made of the devil. Everything in it relates to the usual course of nature. The serpent was considered by all oriental nations, not only as the most cunning of all animals, but likewise as immortal. The Chaldæans had a fable concerning a quarrel between God and the serpent, and this fable had been preserved by Pherecydes. Origen cites it in his sixth book against Celsus. A serpent was borne in procession at the feasts of Bacchus. The Egyptians, according to the statement of Eusebius in the first book of the tenth chapter of his "Evangelical Preparation," attached a sort of divinity to the serpent. In Arabia, India, and even China, the serpent was regarded as a symbol of life; and hence it was that the emperors of China, long before the time of Moses, always bore upon their breast the image of a serpent.
Eve expresses no astonishment at the serpent's speaking to her. In all ancient histories, animals have spoken; hence Pilpay and Lokman excited no surprise by their introduction of animals conversing and disputing.
The whole of this affair appears so clearly to have been supposed in the natural course of events, and so unconnected with anything allegorical, that the narrative assigns a reason why the serpent, from that time, has moved creeping on its belly, why we always are eager to crush it under our feet, and why it always attempts—at least according to the popular belief—to bite and wound us. Precisely as, with respect to presumed changes affecting certain animals recorded in ancient fable, reasons were stated why the crow which originally had been white is at the present day black; why the owl quits his gloomy retreat only by night; why the wolf is devoted to carnage. The fathers, however, believed the affair to be an allegory at once clear and venerable. The safest way is to believe like them.
"I will multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. Thou shalt be under the power of the man, and he shall rule over thee." Why, it is asked, should the multiplication of conception be a punishment? It was, on the contrary, says the objector, esteemed a superior blessing, particularly among the Jews. The pains of childbirth are inconsiderable, in all except very weak or delicate women. Those accustomed to labor are delivered, particularly in warm climates, with great ease. Brutes frequently experience greater suffering from this process of nature: some even die under it. And with respect to the superiority or dominion of the man over the woman, it is merely in the natural course of events; it is the effect of strength of body, and even of strength of mind. Men, generally speaking, possess organs more capable of continued attention than women, and are better fitted by nature for labors both of the head and arm. But when a woman possesses both a hand and a mind more powerful than her husband's, she everywhere possesses the dominion over him; it is then the husband that is under subjection to the wife. There is certainly truth in these remarks; but it might, nevertheless, very easily be the fact that, before the commission of the original sin, neither subjection nor sorrow existed.
"The Lord made for them coats of skins." This passage decidedly proves that the Jews believed God to be corporeal. A rabbi, of the name of Eliezer, stated in his works that God clothed Adam and Eve with the skin of the very serpent who had tempted them; and Origen maintains that this coat of skins was a new flesh, a new body, which God conferred on man. It is far better to adhere respectfully to the literal texts.
"And the Lord said; Lo! Adam is become like one of us." It seems as if the Jews admitted, originally, many gods. It is somewhat more difficult to determine what they meant by the word "God,"Elohim. Some commentators have contended that the expression "one of us" signifies the Trinity. But certainly there is nothing relating to the Trinity throughout the Bible. The Trinity is not a compound of many or several Gods: it is one and the same god threefold; and the Jews never heard the slightest mention of one god in three persons. By the words "like us," or "as one of us," it is probable that the Jews understood the angels,Elohim. It is this passage which has induced many learned men very rashly to conclude that this book was not written until that people had adopted the belief of those inferior gods. But this opinion has been condemned.
"The Lord sent him forth from the garden of Eden to cultivate the ground." "But," it is remarked by some, "the Lord had placed him in the garden of Eden tocultivatethat garden." If Adam, instead of being a gardener, merely becomes a laborer, his situation, they observe, is not made very much worse by the change. A good laborer is well worth a good gardener. These remarks must be regarded as too light and frivolous. It appears more judicious to say that God punished disobedience by banishing the offender from the place of his nativity.
The whole of this history, generally speaking—according to the opinion of liberal, not to say licentious, commentators—proceeds upon the idea which has prevailed in every past age, and still exists, that the first times were better and happier than those which followed. Men have always complained of the present and extolled the past. Pressed down by the labors of life, they have imagined happiness to consist in inactivity, not considering that the most unhappy of all states is that of a man who has nothing to do. They felt themselves frequently miserable, and framed in their imaginations an ideal period in which all the world had been happy; although it might be just as naturally and truly supposed that there had existed times in which no tree decayed and perished, in which no beast was weak, diseased, or devoured by another, and in which spiders did not prey upon flies. Hence the idea of the golden age; of the egg pierced by Arimanes; of the serpent who stole from the ass the recipe for obtaining a happy and immortal life, which the man had placed upon his pack-saddle; of the conflict between Typhon and Osiris, and between Opheneus and the gods; of the famous box of Pandora; and of all those ancient tales, of which some are ingenious, but none instructive. But we are bound to believe that the fables of other nations are imitations of the Hebrew history, since we possess the ancient history of the Hebrews, and the early books of other nations are nearly all destroyed. Besides the testimonies in favor of the Book of Genesis are irrefragable.
"And He placed before the garden of Eden a cherub with a flaming sword, which turned all round to guard the way to the tree of life." The word "kerub" signifiesox. An ox armed with a flaming sword is rather a singular exhibition, it is said, before a portal. But the Jews afterwards represented angels under the form of oxen and hawks although they were forbidden to make any images. They evidently derived these emblems of oxen and hawks from the Egyptians, whom they imitated in so many other things. The Egyptians first venerated the ox as the emblem of agriculture, and the hawk as that of the winds; but they never converted the ox into a sentinel. It is probably an allegory; and the Jews by "kerub" understood nature. It was a symbol formed of the head of an ox, the head and body of a man, and the wings of a hawk.
"And the Lord set a mark upon Cain." What Lord? says the infidel. He accepts the offering of Abel, and rejects that of his elder brother, without the least reason being assigned for the distinction. By this proceeding the Lord was the cause of animosity between the two brothers. We are presented in this piece of history, it is true, with a moral, however humiliating, lesson; a lesson to be derived from all the fables of antiquity, that scarcely had the race of man commenced the career of existence, before one brother assassinates another. But what the sages, of this world consider contrary to everything moral, to everything just, to all the principles of common sense, is that God, who inflicted eternal damnation on the race of man, and useless crucifixion on His own son, on account merely of the eating of an apple, should absolutely pardon a fratricide! nay, that He should more than pardon, that He should take the offender under His peculiar protection! He declares that whoever shall avenge the murder of Abel shall experience sevenfold the punishment that Cain might have suffered. He puts a mark upon him as a safeguard. Here, continue these vile blasphemers, here is a fable as execrable as it is absurd. It is the raving of some wretched Jew, who wrote those infamous and revolting fooleries, in imitation of the tales so greedily swallowed by the neighboring population in Syria. This senseless Jew attributes these atrocious reveries to Moses, at a time when nothing was so rare as books. That fatality, which affects and disposes of everything, has handed down this contemptible production to our own times. Knaves have extolled it, and fools have believed it. Such is the language of a tribe of theists, who, while they adore a God, dare to condemn the God of Israel; and who judge of the conduct of the eternal Deity by the rules of our own imperfect morality, and erroneous justice. They admit a God, to subject Him to our laws. Let us guard against such rashness; and, once again it must be repeated, let us revere what we cannot comprehend. Let us cry out,O Altitudo! O the height and depth! with all our strength.
"The gods Elohim, seeing the daughters of men that they were fair, took for wives those whom they chose." This imagination, again, may be traced in the history of every people. No nation has ever existed, unless perhaps we may except China, in which some god is not described as having had offspring from women. These corporeal gods frequently descended to visit their dominions upon earth; they saw the daughters of our race, and attached themselves to those who were most interesting and beautiful: the issue of this connection between gods and mortals must of course have been superior to other men; accordingly, Genesis informs us that from the association it mentions, of the gods with women, sprang a race of giants.
"I will bring a deluge of waters upon the earth." I will merely observe here that St. Augustine, in his "City of God," No. 8, says, "Maximum illud diluvium Græca nec Latina novit historia"—neither Greek nor Latin history knows anything about the great deluge. In fact, none had ever been known in Greece but those of Deucalion and Ogyges. They are regarded as universal in the fables collected by Ovid, but are wholly unknown in eastern Asia. St. Augustine, therefore, is not mistaken, in saying that history makes no mention of this event.
"God said to Noah, I will make a covenant with you, and with your seed after you, and with all living creatures." God make a covenant with beasts! What sort of a covenant? Such is the outcry of infidels. But if He makes a covenant with man, why not with the beast? It has feeling, and there is something as divine in feeling as in the most metaphysical meditation. Besides, beasts feel more correctly than the greater part of men think. It is clearly in virtue of this treaty that Francis d'Assisi, the founder of the Seraphic order, said to the grasshoppers and the hares, "Pray sing, my dear sister grasshopper; pray browse, my dear brother hare." But what were the conditions of the treaty? That all animals should devour one another; that they should feed upon our flesh, and we upon theirs; that, after having eaten them, we should proceed with wrath and fury to the extermination of our own race—nothing being then wanting to crown the horrid series of butchery and cruelty, but devouring our fellow-men, after having thus remorselessly destroyed them. Had there been actually such a treaty as this it could have been entered into only with the devil.
Probably the meaning of the whole passage is neither more nor less than that God is equally the absolute master of everything that breathes. This pact can be nothing more than an order, and the word "covenant" is used merely as more emphatic and impressive; we should not therefore be startled and offended at the words, but adore the spirit, and direct our minds back to the period in which this book was written—a book of scandal to the weak, but of edification to the strong.
"And I will put my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of my covenant." Observe that the author does not say, Ihaveput my bow in the clouds; he says, Iwillput: this clearly implies it to have been the prevailing opinion that there had not always been a rainbow. This phenomenon is necessarily produced by rain; yet in this place it is represented as something supernatural, exhibited in order to announce and prove that the earth should no more be inundated. It is singular to choose the certain sign of rain, in order to assure men against their being drowned. But it may also be replied that in any danger of inundation, we have the cheering security of the rainbow.
"But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of Adam had built, and he said, 'Behold a people which have but one language. They have begun to do this, and they will not desist until they have completed it. Come, then, let us go and confound their language, that no one may understand his neighbor.'" Observe here, that the sacred writer always continues to conform to the popular opinions. He always speaks of God as of a man who endeavors to inform himself of what is passing, who is desirous of seeing with his own eyes what is going on in his dominions, who calls together his council in order to deliberate with them.
"And Abraham having divided his men—who were three hundred and eighteen in number—fell upon the five kings, and pursued them unto Hoba, on the left hand of Damascus." From the south bank of the lake of Sodom to Damascus was a distance of eighty leagues, not to mention crossing the mountains Libanus and Anti-Libanus. Infidels smile and triumph at such exaggeration. But as the Lord favored Abraham, nothing was in fact exaggerated.
"And two angels arrived at Sodom at even." The whole history of these two angels, whom the inhabitants of Sodom wished to violate, is perhaps the most extraordinary in the records of all antiquity. But it must be considered that almost all Asia believed in the existence of the demoniacal incubus and succubus; and moreover, that these two angels were creatures more perfect than mankind, and must have possessed more beauty to stimulate their execrable tendencies. It is possible that the passage may be only meant as a rhetorical figure to express the atrocious depravity of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is not without the greatest diffidence that we suggest to the learned this solution.
As to Lot, who proposes to the people of Sodom the substitution of his two daughters in the room of the angels; and his wife, who was changed into a statue of salt, and all the rest of that history, what shall we venture to say? The old Arabian tale of Kinyras and Myrrha has some resemblance to the incest of Lot with his daughters; and the adventure of Philemon and Baucis is somewhat similar to the case of the two angels who appeared to Lot and his wife. With respect to the statue of salt, we know not where to find any resemblance; perhaps in the history of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Many ingenious men are of opinion, with the great Newton and the learned Leclerc that the Pentateuch was written by Samuel when the Jews had a little knowledge of reading and writing, and that all these histories are imitations of Syrian fables.
But it is enough that all this is in the Holy Scripture to induce us to reverence it, without attempting to find out in this book anything besides what is written by the Holy Spirit. Let us always recollect that those times were not like our times; and let us not fail to repeat, after so many great men, that the Old Testament is a true history; and that all that has been written differing from it by the rest of the world is fabulous.
Some critics have contended that all the incredible passages in the canonical books, which scandalize weak minds, ought to be suppressed; but it has been observed in answer that those critics had bad hearts, and ought to be burned at the stake; and that it is impossible to be a good man without believing that the people of Sodom wanted to violate two angels. Such is the reasoning of a species of monsters who wish to lord it over the understandings of mankind.
It is true that many eminent fathers of the Church have had the prudence to turn all these histories into allegories, after the example of the Jews, and particularly of Philo. The popes, more discreet, have endeavored to prevent the translation of these books into the vulgar tongue, lest some men should in consequence be led to think and judge, about what was proposed to them only to adore.
We are certainly justified in concluding hence, that those who thoroughly understand this book should tolerate those who do not understand it at all; for if the latter understand nothing of it, it is not their own fault: on the other hand, those who comprehend nothing that it contains should tolerate those who comprehend everything in it.
Learned and ingenious men, full of their own talents and acquirements, have maintained that it is impossible that Moses could have written the Book of Genesis. One of their principal reasons is that in the history of Abraham that patriarch is stated to have paid for a cave which he purchased for the interment of his wife, in silver coin, and the king of Gerar is said to have given Sarah a thousand pieces of silver when he restored her, after having carried her off for her beauty at the age of seventy-five. They inform us that they have consulted all the ancient authors, and that it appears very certain that at the period mentioned silver money was not in existence. But these are evidently mere cavils, as the Church has always firmly believed Moses to have been the author of the Pentateuch. They strengthen all the doubts suggested by Aben-Ezra, and Baruch Spinoza. The physician Astruc, father-in-law of the comptroller-general Silhouette, in his book—now become very scarce—called "Conjectures on the Book of Genesis," adds some objections, inexplicable undoubtedly to human learning, but not so to a humble and submissive piety. The learned, many of them, contradict every line, but the devout consider every line sacred. Let us dread falling into the misfortune of believing and trusting to our reason; but let us bring ourselves into subjection in understanding as well as in heart.
"And Abraham said that Sarah was his sister, and the king of Gerar took her for himself." We admit, as we have said under the article on "Abraham," that Sarah was at this time ninety years of age, that she had been already carried away by a king of Egypt, and that a king of this same horrid wilderness of Gerar, likewise, many years afterwards, carried away the wife of Isaac, Abraham's son. We have also spoken of his servant, Hagar, who bore him a son, and of the manner in which the patriarch sent her and her son away. It is well known how infidels triumph on the subject of all these histories, with what a disdainful smile they speak of them, and that they place the story of one Abimelech falling in love with Sarah whom Abraham had passed off as his sister, and of another Abimelech falling in love with Rebecca, whom Isaac also passes as his sister, even beneath the thousand and one nights of the Arabian fables. We cannot too often remark that the great error of all these learned critics is their wishing to try everything by the test of our feeble reason, and to judge of the ancient Arabs as they judge of the courts of France or of England.
"And the soul of Shechem, King Hamor's son, was bound up with the soul of Dinah, and he soothed her grief by his tender caresses, and he went to Hamor his father, and said to him, give me that woman to be my wife."
Here our critics exclaim in terms of stronger disgust than ever. "What!" say they; "the son of a king is desirous to marry a vagabond girl;" the marriage is celebrated; Jacob the father, and Dinah the daughter, are loaded with presents; the king of Shechem deigns to receive those wandering robbers called patriarchs within his city; he has the incredible politeness or kindness to undergo, with his son, his court, and his people, the rite of circumcision, thus condescending to the superstition of a petty horde that could not call half a league of territory their own! And in return for this astonishing hospitality and goodness, how do our holy patriarchs act? They wait for the day when the process of circumcision generally induces fever, when Simeon and Levi run through the whole city with poniards in their hands and massacre the king, the prince his son, and all the inhabitants. We are precluded from the horror appropriate to this infernal counterpart of the tragedy of St. Bartholomew, only by a sense of its absolute impossibility. It is an abominable romance; but it is evidently a ridiculous romance. It is impossible that two men could have slaughtered in quiet the whole population of a city. The people might suffer in a slight degree from the operation which had preceded, but notwithstanding this, they would have risen in self-defence against two diabolical miscreants; they would have instantly assembled, would have surrounded them, and destroyed them with the summary and complete vengeance merited by their atrocity.
But there is a still more palpable impossibility. It is, that according to the accurate computation of time, Dinah, this daughter of Jacob, could be only three years old; and that, even by forcing up chronology as far as possible in favor of the narrative, she could at the very most be only five. It is here, then, that we are assailed with bursts of indignant exclamation! "What!" it is said, "what! is it this book, the book of a rejected and reprobate people; a book so long unknown to all the world; a book in which sound reason and decent manners are outraged in every page, that is held up to us as irrefragable, holy, and dictated by God Himself? Is it not even impious to believe it? or could anything less than the fury of cannibals urge to the persecution of sensible and modest men for not believing it?"
To this we reply: "The Church declares its belief in it. The copyists may have mixed up some revolting absurdities with respectable and genuine histories. It belongs to the holy church only to decide. The profane ought to be guided by her. Those absurdities, those alleged horrors do not affect the substance of our faith. How lamentable would be the fate of mankind, if religion and virtue depended upon what formerly happened to Shechem and to little Dinah!"
"These are the kings who reigned in the land of Edom before the children of Israel had a king." This is the celebrated passage which has proved one of the great stumbling stones. This it was which decided the great Newton, the pious and acute Samuel Clarke, the profound and philosophic Bolingbroke, the learned Leclerc, the ingenious Fréret, and a host of other enlightened men, to maintain that it was impossible Moses could have been the author of Genesis.
We admit that in fact these words could not have been written until after the time that the Jews had kings.
It is principally this verse that determined Astruc to give up the inspired authority of the whole Book of Genesis, and suppose the author had derived his materials from existing memoirs and records. His work is ingenious and accurate, but it is rash, not to say audacious. Even a council would scarcely have ventured on such an enterprise. And to what purpose has it served Astruc's thankless and dangerous labor—to double the darkness he wished to enlighten? Here is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of which we are all so desirous of eating. Why must it be, that the fruit of the tree of ignorance should be more nourishing and more digestible?
But of what consequence can it be to us, after all, whether any particular verse or chapter was written by Moses, or Samuel, or the priest (sacrificateur) who came to Samaria, or Esdras, or any other person? In what respect can our government, our laws, our fortunes, our morals, our well-being, be bound up with the unknown chiefs of a wretched and barbarous country called Edom or Idumæa, always inhabited by robbers? Alas! those poor Arabs, who have not shirts to their backs, neither know nor care whether or not we are in existence! They go on steadily plundering caravans, and eating barley bread, while we are perplexing and tormenting ourselves to know whether any petty kings flourished in a particular canton of Arabia Petræa, before they existed in a particular canton adjoining the west of the lake of Sodom!
O miseras hominum curas! Opectora cœca!—LUCRETIUS, ii. 14.Blind, wretched man! in what dark paths of strifeThou walkest the little journey of thy life!—CREECH.
The doctrines of judicial astrology and magic have spread all over the world. Look back to the ancient Zoroaster, and you will find that of the genii long established. All antiquity abounds in astrologers and magicians; such ideas were therefore very natural. At present, we smile at the number who entertained them; if we were in their situation, if like them we were only beginning to cultivate the sciences, we should perhaps believe just the same. Let us suppose ourselves intelligent people, beginning to reason on our own existence, and to observe the stars. The earth, we might say, is no doubt immovable in the midst of the world; the sun and planets only revolve in her service, and the stars are only made for us; man, therefore, is the great object of all nature. What is the intention of all these globes, and of the immensity of heaven thus destined for our use? It is very likely that all space and these globes are peopled with substances, and since we are the favorites of nature, placed in the centre of the universe, and all is made for man, these substances are evidently destined to watch over man.
The first man who believed the thing at all possible would soon find disciples persuaded that it existed. We might then commence by saying, genii perhaps exist, and nobody could affirm the contrary; for where is the impossibility of the air and planets being peopled? We might afterwards say therearegenii, and certainly no one could prove that there are not. Soon after, some sages might see these genii, and we should have no right to say to them: "You have not seen them"; as these persons might be honorable, and altogether worthy of credit. One might see the genius of the empire or of his own city; another that of Mars or Saturn; the genii of the four elements might be manifested to several philosophers; more than one sage might see his own genius; all at first might be little more than dreaming, but dreams are the symbols of truth.
It was soon known exactly how these genii were formed. To visit our globe, they must necessarily have wings; they therefore had wings. We know only of bodies; they therefore had bodies, but bodies much finer than ours, since they were genii, and much lighter, because they came from so great a distance. The sages who had the privilege of conversing with the genii inspired others with the hope of enjoying the same happiness. A skeptic would have been ill received, if he had said to them: "I have seen no genius, therefore there are none." They would have replied: "You reason ill; it does not follow that a thing exists not, which is unknown to you. There is no contradiction in the doctrine which inculcates these ethereal powers; no impossibility that they may visit us; they show themselves to our sages, they manifest themselves to us; you are not worthy of seeing genii."
Everything on earth is composed of good and evil; there are therefore incontestably good and bad genii. The Persians had their peris and dives; the Greeks, their demons and cacodæmons; the Latins,bonos et malos genios. The good genii are white, and the bad black, except among the negroes, where it is necessarily the reverse. Plato without difficulty admits of a good and evil genius for every individual. The evil genius of Brutus appeared to him, and announced to him his death before the battle of Philippi. Have not grave historians said so? And would not Plutarch have been very injudicious to have assured us of this fact, if it were not true?
Further, consider what a source of feasts, amusements, good tales, and bon mots, originated in the belief of genii!
There were male and female genii. The genii of the ladies were called by the Romans little Junos. They also had the pleasure of seeing their genii grow up. In infancy, they were a kind of Cupid with wings, and when they protected old age, they wore long beards, and even sometimes the forms of serpents. At Rome, there is preserved a marble, on which is represented a serpent under a palm tree, to which are attached two crowns with this inscription: "To the genius of the Augusti"; it was the emblem of immortality.
What demonstrative proof have we at present, that the genii, so universally admitted by so many enlightened nations, are only phantoms of the imagination? All that can be said is reduced to this: "I have never seen a genius, and no one of my acquaintance has ever seen one; Brutus has not written that his genius appeared to him before the battle of Philippi; neither Newton, Locke, nor even Descartes, who gave the reins to his imagination; neither kings nor ministers of state have ever been suspected of communing with their genii; therefore I do not believe a thing of which there is not the least truth. I confess their existence is not impossible; but the possibility is not a proof of the reality. It is possible that there may be satyrs, with little turned-up tails and goats' feet; but I must see several to believe in them; for if I saw but one, I should still doubt their existence."
Of genius or demon, we have already spoken in the article on "angel." It is not easy to know precisely whether the peris of the Persians were invented before the demons of the Greeks, but it is very probable that they were. It may be, that the souls of the dead, called shades, manes, etc., passed for demons. Hesiod makes Hercules say that a demon dictated his labors.
The demon of Socrates had so great a reputation, that Apuleius, the author of the "Golden Ass," who was himself a magician of good repute, says in his "Treatise on the Genius of Socrates," that a man must be without religion who denies it. You see that Apuleius reasons precisely like brothers Garasse and Bertier: "You do not believe that which I believe; you are therefore without religion." And the Jansenists have said as much of brother Bertier, as well as of all the world except themselves. "These demons," says the very religious and filthy Apuleius, "are intermediate powers between ether and our lower region. They live in our atmosphere, and bear our prayers and merits to the gods. They treat of succors and benefits, as interpreters and ambassadors. Plato says, that it is by their ministry that revelations, presages, and the miracles of magicians, are effected."—"Cæterum sunt quædam divinæ mediæ potestates, inter summum æthera, et infimas terras, in isto intersitæ æris spatio, per quas et desideria nostra et merita ad deos commeant. Hos Græco nomine demonias nuncupant. Inter terricolas cœli colasque victores, hinc pecum, inde donorum: qui ultro citroque portant, hinc petitiones, inde suppetias: ceu quidam utriusque interpretes, et salutigeri. Per hos eosdem, ut Plato in symposio autumat, cuncta denuntiata; et majorum varia miracula, omnesque præsagium species reguntur."
St. Augustine has condescended to refute Apuleius in these words:
"It is impossible for us to say that demons are neither mortal nor eternal, for all that has life, either lives eternally, or loses the breath of life by death; and Apuleius has said, that as to time, the demons are eternal. What then remains, but that demons hold a medium situation, and have one quality higher and another lower than mankind; and as, of these two things, eternity is the only higher thing which they exclusively possess, to complete the allotted medium, what must be the lower, if not misery?" This is powerful reasoning!
As I have never seen any genii, demons, peris, or hobgoblins, whether beneficent or mischievous, I cannot speak of them from knowledge. I only relate what has been said by people who have seen them.
Among the Romans, the word "genius" was not used to express a rare talent, as with us: the term for that quality wasingenium. We use the word "genius" indifferently in speaking of the tutelar demon of a town of antiquity, or an artist, or a musician. The term "genius" seems to have been intended to designate not great talents generally, but those into which invention enters. Invention, above everything, appeared a gift from the gods—thisingenium, quasi ingenitum, a kind of divine inspiration. Now an artist, however perfect he may be in his profession, if he have no invention, if he be not original, is not considered a genius. He is only inspired by the artists his predecessors, even when he surpasses them.
It is very probable that many people now play at chess better than the inventor of the game, and that they might gain the prize of corn promised him by the Indian king. But this inventor was a genius, and those who might now gain the prize would be no such thing. Poussin, who was a great painter before he had seen any good pictures, had a genius for painting. Lulli, who never heard any good musician in France, had a genius for music.
Which is the more desirable to possess, a genius without a master, or the attainment of perfection by imitating and surpassing the masters which precede us?
If you put this question to artists, they will perhaps be divided; if you put it to the public, it will not hesitate. Do you like a beautiful Gobelin tapestry better than one made in Flanders at the commencement of the arts? Do you prefer modern masterpieces of engraving to the first wood-cuts? the music of the present day to the first airs, which resembled the Gregorian chant? the makers of the artillery of our time to the genius which invented the first cannon? everybody will answer, "yes." All purchasers will say: "I own that the inventor of the shuttle had more genius than the manufacturer who made my cloth, but my cloth is worth more than that of the inventor."
In short, every one in conscience will confess, that we respect the geniuses who invented the arts, but that the minds which perfect them are of more present benefit.
The article on "Genius" has been treated in the "Encyclopædia" by men who possess it. We shall hazard very little after them.
Every town, every man possessed a genius. It was imagined that those who performed extraordinary things were inspired by their genius. The nine muses were nine genii, whom it was necessary to invoke; therefore Ovid says: "Et Deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo"—"The God within us, He the mind inspires."
But, properly speaking, is genius anything but capability? What is capability but a disposition to succeed in an art? Why do we say the genius of a language? It is, that every language, by its terminations, articles, participles, and shorter or longer words, will necessarily have exclusive properties of its own.
By the genius of a nation is meant the character, manners, talents, and even vices, which distinguish one people from another. It is sufficient to see the French, English, and Spanish people, to feel this difference.
We have said that the particular genius of a man for an art is a different thing from his general talent; but this name is given only to a very superior ability. How many people have talent for poetry, music, and painting; yet it would be ridiculous to call them geniuses.
Genius, conducted by taste, will never commit a gross fault. Racine, since his "Andromache," "Le Poussin," and "Rameau," has never committed one. Genius, without taste, will often commit enormous errors; and, what is worse, it will not be sensible of them.