But with the Protestant culture of the North it was far otherwise. _That_ had been based upon a book, and the literal interpretation of that book. It had, of course, its profound spiritual origin, an excessive and enthusiastic passion for lonely communion with God. But its rock of authority was the Book.
The fragments of Hebrew folklore which the Catholic Church affirms to be inspired, had always been used by that Church as examples, positive and negative, in support of her doctrines; and particularly as mystical, often allegorical, prophetic figurings of one great event that was to come: the Incarnation. But, in the Protestant culture, these Old Testament stories were _lived_. They had become flesh and bone of their readers. The very characters therein took on a divine air; the cruelties, the obscenities, the puerilities, equally with the occasional sublime actions and sayings of those Old Testament characters, became in men’s minds the attributes of demigods.
This absorption in the ancient relics of Hebrew Scripture produced a corresponding vivid attachment to the pictures aroused by their reading. The allegories became for men of the Protestant culture concrete and undoubted events, taken for granted as historical and, which is much more, made the basis of all daily life. Adam and Eve, for instance, were to Milton, and to all who read Milton, for one hundred and fifty years and more, a particular man and woman, of an aspect remembered from the frontispiece of the family Bible. They lived in a particular place not unlike the finer landscapes of England. They walked with God and with his angels as one walks in a garden; the humans and their majestic companions sauntered over real lawns, upon real feet, taking steps some two feet long—real steps. And the couple ate, not even a vague fruit, but a particular apple to their hurt. So it was right through. On such pictures, taken to be plain history and history inspiring all action, was the new culture of the seventeenth century built in the North.
When all this structure was blown to pieces in the nineteenth century by those discoveries of which this priest’s at Torquay was the first, it did not follow that the tradition and momentum of the old superstition would disappear as easily. Far from that. The main effects of the old Bibliolatry are with us to-day in London, and in Berlin, in Scandinavia, in the United States; though divergent and under various forms, the effects of Bibliolatry have clearly produced a something in common which still profoundly separates the Protestant from the Catholic culture.
The upsetting of the Bible authority, then, did not produce in the nations of Protestant culture a revolt against the Protestant rule of life. That is not what happened. But what did happen was a bewilderment, a chaos, a disintegration of all the solid things which had stood firm in the North from the first generation of the seventeenth century down to the first generation of the nineteenth. The Protestant culture did not separate into a clerical and an anti-clerical, a traditional and practising as against a mocking temper: it moved in the main as one. But it moved, eddying and changing continually, like a great cloud of dust following on the crash of a building. It continued, after the catastrophe, to whirl and change: so much so, that no one can tell at this moment, or could tell under the very different spirit of, say twenty years ago, what form the ultimate settlement may take.
For there is no settlement yet. Even to-day, even in the (for the moment) popular mythology of cave men and prehistory and the rest of it, there is nothing fixed. Characteristically enough, the guesswork is turned into dogma, and faith reposes on concrete images. But the dogmas change every few years, and the images as well. All within the murk is still changing, and will continue to change, until the dust of the explosion has come slowly to earth and has stratified. When that happens there will be a new heresy. I wonder what it will be like?
Well, the man who first lit the match, the man who was the author of the explosion, was Dr. McEnery, Catholic priest, of Torquay.
He was not listened to. The truth seemed too fantastic. The great Cuvier had dealt with so many hoaxes of the kind (men having sent him, among other things, the bones of fossil elephants by way of pre-Adamite giants) that even in a rational society there would have been hesitation. In the provincial society of England, 1829, there was more than hesitation—there was contempt and silence. Man older than 4004 (or 4005) B.C. was a mad blasphemy. The idea was not to be tolerated.
It took a solid thirty or forty years before even educated people in this country could be made familiar with so simple an idea. Now—after less than a hundred years—not only has that idea soaked right through society to its lowest depths, but a new conservatism has taken root, and we find the same provincial people clinging tenaciously to-day to exploded nonsense like Darwin’s Natural Selection, and the imaginary evidence of embryology.
On the whole it is a good thing, this ultra-conservative instinct. It has ridiculous sides to it, but it is a great deal better than the iconoclast spirit. It does harm when it is used to bolster up injustice or false doctrine, as in the case of men who still go on defending human cruelty and oppression on some muddle-headed plea called ‘survival of the fittest’—which simply means survival of that which survives; or when they convince themselves of some impossible blind process of uncreative change without a Creator, and therefore conceive that they may at once abandon even such poor wrecks of moral discipline as have survived in them.
More interesting to me (I am sorry to say—for I have few companions in this, and it is a lonely interest) than the discovery of evidence to the great antiquity of man, is the absence of evidence which _ought_ to be there in the nature of things, but which no one has yet come across. What I ardently desire is discovery showing, or even hinting at, the way in which man became what we call _civilised_.
As far as you can go back you see civilised man existing, and, side by side with him, barbaric man: I mean, ‘as far as you can go back’ in any real record not only of writing, but of monument. Take the whole period of surviving record, whatever it may be (no one really knows: but it is certainly more than five thousand years, and may be more than six thousand). You find at the origin of it men sculpturing, building with cut stone and bricks, and leaving record of their actions; inhabiting cities; possessed of laws—and all the rest of it. Then there is a halt. You come to the end of a blind alley. You come up against a wall and there is nothing beyond.
There is plenty of guesswork, of course, passing for knowledge—but that is negligible. All you have in the way of real evidence is a few bones which are almost certainly older than the records of any civilisation, and quite numerous relics of barbaric culture, fish-hooks, and coarse weaving, and coarse pottery, and so on. Behind that you have—but after an impossible gulf—roughly-chipped stones, of which some small proportion may have been fashioned by an intelligent being, but of which most, in spite of the cocksureness of those who collect and describe them, are very doubtful indeed. No one really knows how far back these things go, for no one knows the rate at which earth may be or was laid down in floods, of what nature the catastrophes of the past may have been. But of transition from such doubtful fragments to the neolithic and from this to civilised man who carves splendour out of granite, and who measures earth and heaven, not a trace.
What is most remarkable, no one that I have ever read has properly tabulated the rough stone implements in a series.
Now that is what we want. We ought to have some large monograph, properly illustrated, showing in a graduated series such so-called ‘paleoliths’ as are possibly of human handicraft; then others less likely be so, and so on down to the most doubtful. It is of no use to the ordinary educated man to be told by self-styled experts that this or that lumpish thing was (though it doesn’t look it) of human handiwork; he can judge that for himself: and as the expert is all out for making it human if he possibly can, he is to be discounted. What we want is, I say, a monograph giving specimens in a graded series: and then, side by side with these, a full description of the place and conditions where they were found.
When that is done we shall be able to judge for ourselves, and not to accept the priestcraft of the people who call themselves scientists; we shall be able to make some rough judgment on the comparative age of such implements. If evident paleoliths are discovered under a depth of stratified stone (not gravel or earth) which argues some very long period of accumulation, I should conclude that man did make them in some very remote time, to which, perhaps, a minimum limit can be set; but until we have them all graded, and discussed according to their grades, and with proof of the rate of stratification, we are at the mercy of men whose business it is to bring forward as many marvels as possible, as it has been the business of all who in all times desire to cut a figure before the people.