verb ny to bow oneself in acts of worship. The worship of idols is indicated by the hiphil form of the word ay (Jer. xliv, 19), and the Aramaic 0. But aside from any special use or implication of definite words, the scriptures of the Old and the New Testaments abound in teaching and illustrations of the religious nature of man. This element shows itself in every race and nation, and is inseparable from the affectional and rational nature. It has been one of the vital factors in the progress of civilization. There can be no correct knowledge of man and no thorough philosophy of human history without a fair reckoning with the facts of man's religious nature. 3. Earliest Manifestations of the Religious Sense. How religion first manifested itself in human life and thought must needs be a matter of conjecture. That the religious feeling originated in an overwhelming sense of superior power, and a consequent fear arising from the consciousness of human limitations, has been the belief of many. But this hypothesis in its logical analysis virtually concedes that the essential content of religion is a revelation of God himself to the religious sensibility inherent in the nature of man. Though the notion of God thus received be vague and imperfect, it contains in every instance the fundamental concept of man's dependence on a higher Power by reason of some necessary constitutional relationship. All prayers and all forms of worship give expression to this fact. 4. Has due Recognition in Scripture. The religious element in man naturally receives due attention in the Scriptures. The pictures of earliest patriarchal times recorded in the book of Genesis, and those also of later times, recognize the worship of God among all the peoples. Melchizedek appears as a famous priest of El-Elyon (Gen. xiv, 18), and Jethro as a priest in Midian (Exod. iii, 1). God speaks in dreams to Abimelech the king of Gerar (Gen. xx, 3). The Hittites call Abraham "a prince of God" among them (Gen. xxiii, 6). Laban the Syrian worshiped teraphim as his gods (Gen. xxxi, 19, 30), and according to Josh. xxiv, 2, the ancestors of Abraham "served other gods" before his migration from beyond the river Euphrates. We read of the 1 Edward Caird, in his Gifford Lectures, discussing the earliest form of religion observes that "religion is essentially a consciousness of the infinite presupposed in all the divisions of the finite, a consciousness which, however little it be understood by him whom it inspires, however coarse and imperfect the form in which it presents itself, is yet an integral element of man's mind, of which he can no more rid himself that he can get rid of the consciousness of the object or of himself. And the true nature of this idea, as it is implied in the very constitution of our intelligence, continually reacts against the imperfect form in which it is presented. In this way it is not unnatural that even at the lowest stage of his life man should be visited with occasional glimpses of the highest he can ever attain."-The Evolution of Religion, p. 201. New York, 1894. sacred scribes and priests of Egypt (Gen. xli, 8, 49; xlvii, 22), and how the God of Israel "executed judgment against all the gods of Egypt" (Exod. xii, 12). The various nations of the land of Canaan had their numerous gods and forms of idolatrous worship. There were gods of the Amorites, the Philistines, the Ammonites, the Moabites, the Syrians, and the Zidonians. The Israelites in Canaan after the conquest chose new gods (Judg. v, 8), and, according to Num. xxv, 2, they ran after the gods of Moab while Moses was yet among them. Solomon's heart was drawn after the strange gods of his numerous wives (1 Kings xi, 2), and later kings of Israel gave themselves to various kinds of idolatrous worship. The frequent mention of the names of foreign deities also witnesses to the religious faith and practices of the ancient nations. There were Baal, Ashtoreth, Rimmon, Molech, Chemosh, Dagon, Nergal, Anammelech, Adrammelech, Bel, Nebo, and Nisroch. Some of these represented very degrading forms of idolatry, and were denounced by the Hebrew prophets as so many abominations. But the lowest as well as the highest cults evinced the common religious nature of the worshipers. When Paul addressed the men of Athens on the Areopagus he observed that they were conspicuously devoted to the worship of higher powers (κατὰ πάντα δεισιδαιμονεστέρους), and his language suggests that their devotions contained some elements of superstition (Acts xvii, 16, 22-25). 5. Was Gradually Developed. An outline of the early manifestations of the religious element in man is given in the book of Genesis, and the subsequent books of Scripture show how the highest and purest form of religion was gradually developed. The first man and his wife are represented as living together in the most simple innocence, as children under the law of obedience (Gen. ii). The violation of that law was followed by penal judgment and removal from the previous Edenic life (Gen. iii). The firstborn sons evince their religious nature by their offerings to God (Gen. iv, 1-5), and after Abel's death and the birth of Seth, "men began to call upon the name of Jehovah" (iv, 26). Enoch and Noah "walked with God" (v, 21; vi, 9), and after men had multiplied on earth and been scattered far and wide Abram was called out of his kindred and country and chosen to be the great father of a people whose special mission was to receive the highest revelations of God, and by treasuring and transmitting them to become a blessing to all the families of the earth.' And accord The following from William N. Clarke is worthy of frequent meditation: "From of old, even in prehistoric days, when men were groping after God, God was already reaching forth to men. As they gained their bodily and mental ingly, as we read in Heb. i, 1, God spoke unto the fathers through great prophets and teachers and at last by the manifestation of his Son, "who is the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance." 6. Universal in Mankind. It would transcend the scope of biblical dogmatics to go beyond these general statements and enter into the disputed questions of the earliest forms of religion. The facts now fairly stated put it beyond all question that man is essentially a religious being. The great religious systems of Brahmanism, Buddhism, Islam, and others of similar commanding history now wide-spread in the world, as well as the defunct religions of ancient Egypt, Phoenicia, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, might be brought forward for additional testimony to the universal religious element in man.' But further specific evidence seems quite unnecessary. The lowest forms of fetishism, the ideas and customs of totemism, and the purest worship of Christianity, all alike bear witness to a relationship between the human soul and God of which men everywhere are conscious, and from which they cannot effectually cut themselves away. And so the essential facts of the spiritual nature of man evince the universal truth that we are offspring of God. powers through the response of life to its environment, so they gained the use of their spiritual and religious powers through response to an environment that was wholly invisible, but not less real on that account-an environment of their Father's forthreaching love and care. All down through the ages of religion, there has been something that bore the nature of revelation, an intentional imparting of outward knowledge or else of inward light, proceeding from God himself, who willed that it should come to pass. This impartation from God, the invisible environment, became more definite and helpful as the possibility on man's side increased. The crown and fullness of the revelation came in the appearance among men of Jesus Christ, through whom the Father of men made his clearest selfexpression."-Can I believe in God the Father? p. 155. New York, 1899. No reader of the Vedas, the Avesta, the Accadian psalms or the Egyptian ritual of the dead can fail to recognize in them the true ring of real religion. And the old form of apology, therefore, which endeavored to establish the truth of Christianity by contrasting it with the falsehood of all previous creeds, has for us become a thing of the past. It lingers, indeed, still in certain quarters, but is no longer really tenable; as being not only contradicted by the obvious facts of history, but also in its very nature suicidal, since it seeks to enhance the importance of a special revelation by discrediting the natural religion, to which such a reve lation must appeal; to elevate the supernatural by destroying its foundation. -Illingworth, Personality, Human and Divine, p. 161. London, 1894. CHAPTER IV PROPAGATION AND DISPERSION OF MANKIND 1. Unity of the Human Race. The unity of the human race, as having sprung by generation from one original source, is apparently assumed throughout the Scriptures. According to Gen. i, 27, 28, the first man and woman were constituted to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." The fifth chapter of Genesis is remarkable as a "book of the generations of Adam," who "begat in his own likeness, after his own image" (ver. 3). This ancient genealogy connects Adam with Noah through a period of nearly two thousand years, and from the three sons of Noah, according to Gen. ix, 19; x, 32, "the whole earth was overspread." Paul declared before the Athenians that God "made from one' every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth" (Acts xvii, 26), and his great antithesis, represented in Rom. v, 12-19, between Adam and Christ, assumes the propagation of all men from one primeval ancestor. The unity of the race appears to be well attested also by the facts of comparative ethnology, physiology, psychology, philology, and history. But into the detailed arguments, based upon alleged facts, the scope of this treatise does not permit us to enter. It may be observed, however, that, should the polygenous origin of different races of men become a demonstrated conclusion of ethnological science, the interpretation of the Scriptures bearing on the subject would accordingly have to take cognizance of the facts." 2. Propagation of Species. We understand, according to the Scriptures and the best attested conclusions of biology, that the human race, as well as all other orders of organic life, is so constituted as to propagate itself in the earth. To herb, tree, fish, fowl, cattle, beast, and every creeping thing that moves on the earth is the commandment given to be fruitful and multiply each according to its own kind (Gen. i, 11, 12, 21, 24, 25, 28). There is no intimation that man is to be an exception to this The most important three MSS. (N, B, A.) omit the word aiμaros, blood from this text. The doctrine of Pre-Adamites, as maintained by Peyrerius, McCausland and Winchell, is for many reasons inconclusive and unsatisfactory. For the Adam DIN of Genesis is much more naturally understood and explained as referring to the primordial race or races, or even as a generic name for original humanity, than as designating a later development, as, for example, the Caucasian race. universal law. When it is said that Adam begat a child in his own likeness (Gen. v, 3) it is most naturally understood that his offspring was as completely after his kind as is the offspring of any other order of living creature after its kind. Whatever, therefore, goes to constitute the real nature and properties of the human species, as represented in the primeval man-as body, soul, spirit, heart, mind-all are capable of self-propagation. The procreation of man, in the entirety of his nature, may be as confidently affirmed as we affirm the procreation of every other class of living things upon the earth. The transmission not only of striking physical features but also of notable qualities of mind and spirit from parent to child confirms this doctrine of procreation. 3. Creationism and its Proof-texts. Nevertheless, it has been alleged and widely maintained that the human soul is not propagated from parent to offspring, but is created by an immediate act of God upon the event of each human birth. Human parents thus beget the bodies of their offspring, but God in some mysterious way supplies ab extra the living soul, or spirit. It would seem, however, that nothing but the most positive and conclusive evidence, or the most explicit revelation could suffice to show man to be such a remarkable exception to the law which governs the propagation of all other living creatures on the earth. The theory cannot find the slightest support in any facts available in scientific and psychological research. It seems to have had its origin in certain dogmatical assumptions touching "the numerical substance of all mankind" in Adam and the possibility of the division and separation of soul-substance in the propagation of a corrupt human nature-questions which may be said to be obsolete for any serious attention in modern theological study. Some of the principal texts of Scripture in which it seeks support should, perhaps, be briefly considered. It has been argued that the dual nature of man, as described in Gen. ii. 7, distinguishes clearly between body and soul, and shows the one to be of the dust of the earth while the other is from God. But that passage affirms God to be as truly the Creator of man's body from the dust as he was the author of his soul, and it has nothing whatever to tell us about procreation or generation either of soul or body, but is concerned solely with the original creation of man as man. The incidental statement in Eccl. xii, 7, that at the death of a man "the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit unto the God who gave it," has been cited to show that the spirit is from God in some sense that the body is not. But suppose that be conceded, how does it in the least prove |