A MONUMENT TO ADAM
IT is believed that every just-minded and right-feeling American will experience a glow of gratification in the assurance that after ages of indifference, neglect, and even contumelious disparagement, Adam is at last to have a monument. The proposal to erect a “suitable memorial” to the good forefather is singularly touching; in a tranquil, business-like way it gets a tolerably firm footing in the sympathies and sentiments of the human heart, quietly occupying the citadel of the affections before the unready conservatisms of habit, prejudice, and unreason can recover from their surprise to repel it. It will be difficult for even the most impenitent obstructionist to utter himself cogently in opposition; the promoters of the filial scheme will have the argument as much their own way as have the promoters of temperance, chastity, truth, and honor. The comparison is ominous, but not entirely discouraging, inasmuch as the builders of monuments are less dependent on “rightreason and the will of God” than the builders of character. Stones are not laid in logic; even the men of the plains of Shinar, desperately wrong-headed as in the light of Revelation we now perceive them to have been, and ghastly incapable of adding an inch to their moral stature, succeeded in piling up a fairish testimonial to their own worth, and would no doubt have achieved the top course had it not happened that suddenly each appeared to be of a different mind, so that in the multitude of counselors there was little wisdom. Dr. Noah Webster being dead—heaven rest him!—and the reporters of the press being easily propitiated with libations of news, there is not likely to be any tampering with the American tongue that will not be a distinct advantage to it; so we may reasonably expect the stones of the Adamite monument to be appropriately inscribed. Many reasons occur why this ought to be so. Of Adam, even more than of Washington it may justly be said that he was “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” In truth, he was first in everything and all round.
To the patriot the plan of erecting to him a fitting memorial will especially commend itself: it is an American, and therefore a superior,plan. Contrast its glossy originality with the threadbare second-handedness of the project to import Cleopatra’s other needle! The religious mind will not fail to discover in the proposal a kind of special providence for the arrest and eventual overthrow of Infidelity, against whose dark disciples it will lift a finger of permanent admonition. Can even the most flippant scoffer look up at the reverend pile and doubt the Mosaic account of creation? If the architect have only the sagacity to omit the date of erection, and the subscribers the self-denial to forego the glory of displaying their names on it, will not posterity naturally come to think that he whose virtues it commemorates “reposes beneath”? True, the wily scientist, alarmed for his theory, or touched with a sentiment of filial piety asheunderstands it, may countercheck by building a similar monument to the recent Ourang-Outang, the remote Ascidian, or the ultimate Bathybius. He may even have the prudent audacity to put up a stone to the memory of that unthinkable, and therefore irrefutable, Missing Link—as the groping pagan of antiquity with his single gleam of spiritual light erected an altar “To the Unknown God.” If the hardy Evolutionist do anything of thiskind it will be a clear infringement of theleges non scriptæof copyright. Justice, religion, and reason alike will dictate the upsetting of his profane memorial with as little compunction as the wave felt for Caliban’s designs in the sea-sand.
That the Adam monument project is seriously entertained there can be no intelligent doubt: in the list of its founders is publicly mentioned a name which, for better or for worse, is inseparably linked with that of the Great Progenitor—the name of Mark Twain, whose sobs at the paternal tomb have reverberated through the world with an authenticating energy that makes the erection of the monument a matter of comparatively trifling importance, after all.
1878.