In the next place, nothing can be more admirable than these moral laws of the Hebrews, for their simplicity and justice. The pagans enjoined upon men to honor the authors of their days: Solon decrees death as the punishment of the wicked son. What does the divine law say on this subject? It promises life to filial piety. This commandment is founded on the very constitution of our nature. God makes a precept of filial love, but he has not enjoined paternal affection. He knew that the son, in whom are centred all the thoughts and hopes of the father, would often be but too fondly cherished by his parent: but he imposed the duty of love upon the son, because he knew the fickleness and the pride of youth. In the Decalogue, as in the other works of the Almighty, we behold majesty and grace of expression combined with the intrinsic power of divine wisdom. The Brahmin expresses but very imperfectly the three persons of the Deity; the name of Jehovah embraces them in a single word, composed of three tenses of the verb to be united by a sublime combination: havah, he was; hovah, being, or he is; and je, which, when placed before the three radical letters of a verb in Hebrew, indicates the future, he will be. Finally, the legislators of antiquity have marked in their codes the epochs of the festivals of nations; but Israel's sabbath or day of rest is the sabbath of God himself. The Hebrew, as well as the Gentile, his heir, in the hours of his humble occupation, has nothing less before his eyes than the successive creation of the universe. Did Greece, though so highly poetical, ever refer the labors of the husbandman or the artisan to those splendid moments in which God created the light, marked out the course of the sun, and animated the heart of man? Laws of God, how little do you resemble those of human institution! Eternal as the principle whence you emanated, in vain do ages roll away; ye are proof against the lapse of time, against persecution, and against the corruption of nations. This religious legislation, organized in the bosom of political legislations, and nevertheless independent of their fate, is an astonishing prodigy. While forms of government pass away or are newlymodelled, while power is transferred from hand to hand, a few Christians continue, amid the changes of life, to adore the same God, to submit to the same laws, without thinking themselves released from their ties by revolution, adversity, and example. What religion of antiquity did not lose its moral influence with the loss of its priests and its sacrifices? Where are now the mysteries of Trophonius's cave and the secrets of the Eleusinian Ceres? Did not Apollo fall with Delphi, Baal with Babylon, Serapis with Thebes, Jupiter with the Capitol? It can be said of Christianity alone, that it has often witnessed the destruction of its temples, without being affected by their fall. There were not always edifices erected in honor of Jesus Christ; but every place is a temple for the living God: the receptacle of the dead, the cavern of the mountain, and above all, the heart of the righteous. Jesus Christ had not always altars of porphyry, pulpits of cedar and ivory, and happy ones of this world for his servants: a stone in the desert is sufficient for the celebration of his mysteries, a tree for the proclamation of his laws, and a bed of thorns for the practice of his virtues. BOOK III. THE TRUTHS OF THE SCRIPTURES, THE FALL OF MAN. CHAPTER I. THE SUPERIORITY OF THE HISTORY OF MOSES OVER ALL OTHER COSMOGONIES. THERE are truths which no one calls in question, though it is impossible to furnish any direct proofs of them. The rebellion. and fall of Lucifer, the creation of the world, the primeval happiness and transgression of man, belong to the number of these truths. It is not to be supposed that an absurd falsehood could have become a universal tradition. Open the books of the second Zoroaster, the dialogues of Plato, and those of Lucian, the moral treatises of Plutarch, the annals of the Chinese, the Bible of the Hebrews, the Edda of the Scandinavians; go among the negroes of Africa, or the learned priests of India;1 they will all recapitulate the crimes of the evil deity; they will all tell you of the too short period of man's felicity, and the long calamities which followed the loss of his innocence. Voltaire somewhere asserts that we possess a most wretched copy of the different popular traditions respecting the origin of the world, and the physical and moral elements which compose it. Did he prefer, then, the cosmogony of the Egyptians, the great winged egg of the Theban priests ? Hear what is related by the most ancient historian after Moses: "The principle of the universe was a gloomy and tempestuous atmosphere, a wind produced by this gloomy atmosphere and a turbulent chaos. This principle was unbounded, and for a long time had neither limit nor form. But when this wind became enamored of its own principles, a mixture was the result, and this mixture was called desire or love. 1 See note F. 2 Herod., lib. ii.; Diod. Sic. "This mixture being complete was the beginning of all things; but the wind knew not his own offspring, the mixture. With the wind, her father, this mixture produced mud, and hence sprang all the generations of the universe."1 If we pass to the Greek philosophers, we find Thales, the founder of the Ionic sect, asserting water to be the universal principle. Plato contended that the Deity had arranged the world, but had not had the power to create it. God, said he, formed the universe, after the model existing from all eternity in himself. Visible objects are but shadows of the ideas of God, which are the only real substances.5 God, moreover, infused into all beings a breath of his life, and formed of them a third principle, which is both spirit and matter, and which we call the soul of the world. Aristotle reasoned like Plato respecting the origin of the universe; but he conceived the beautiful system of the chain of beings, and, ascending from action to action, he proved that there must exist somewhere a primary principle of motion.7 Zeno maintained that the world was arranged by its own energy; that nature is the system which embraces all things, and consists of two principles, the one active, the other passive, not existing separately, but in combination; that these two principles are subject to a third, which is fatality; that God, matter, and fatality, form but one being; that they compose at once the wheels, the springs, the laws, of the machine, and obey as parts the laws which they dictate as the whole." 9 According to the philosophy of Epicurus, the universe has existed from all eternity. There are but two things in nature,matter and space. Bodies are formed by the aggregation of infinitely minute particles of matter or atoms, which have an internal principle of motion, that is, gravity. Their revolution would 1 Sanch., ap. Euseb., Præpar. Evang., lib. i. c. 10. 2 Cic., de Nat. Deor., lib. i. n. 25. 3 Tim., p. 28; Diog. Laert., lib. iii.; Plut., de Gen. 4 Plat., Tim., p. 29. 5 Id., Rep., lib. vii. 7 Arist., de Gen. An., lib. ii. c. 3; Met., lib. xi. c. 5; Anim., p. 78. 6 Id., in Tim., p. 34. De Cal., lib. xi. c. 3. Laert., lib. v.; Stob., Eccl. Phys., c. xiv. ; Senec., Consol., c. xxix.; Cic. de Nat. Deor.; Anton., lib. vii. 9 Lucret., lib. ii.; Laert., lib. x. be made in a vertical plane, if they did not, in consequence of a particular law, describe an ellipsis in the regions of space.1 Epicurus invented this oblique movement for the purpose of avoiding the system of the fatalists, which would be reproduced by the perpendicular motion of the atom. But the hypothesis is absurd; for if the declination of the atom is a law, it is so from necessity; and how can a necessitated cause produce a free effect? But to proceed. From the fortuitous concourse of these atoms originated the heavens and the earth, the planets and the stars, vegetables, minerals, and animals, including man; and when the productive virtue of the globe was exhausted, the living races were perpetuated by means of generation. The members of the different animals, formed by accident, had no particular destination. The concave ear was not scooped out for the purpose of hearing, nor was the convex eye rounded in order to see; but, as these organs chanced to be adapted to those different uses, the animals employed them mechanically, and in preference to the other senses.3 After this statement of the cosmogonies of the philosophers, it would be superfluous to notice those of the poets. Who has not heard of Deucalion and Pyrrha, of the golden and of the iron ages? As to the traditions current among other nations of the earth, we will simply remark that in the East Indies an elephant supports the globe; in Peru, the sun made all things; in Canada, the great hare is the father of the world; in Greenland, man sprang from a shell-fish; lastly, Scandinavia records the birth of Askus and Emla: Odin gives them a soul, Hæner reason, and Lædur blood and beauty." 1 Loc. cit. . Lucret., lib. v. et x.; Cic., de Nat. Deor., lib. i. c. 8, 9. 3 Lucret., lib. iv., v. 4 See Hesiod; Ovid; Hist. of Hindostan; Herrera, Histor. de las Ind.; Charlevoix, Hist. de la Nouv. Fr.; P. Lafitau, Mœurs des Ind.; Travels in Greenland, by a Missionary. 5 Askum et Emlam, omni conatu destitutos, Animam nec possidebant, rationem nec habebant, BARTHOLIN, Ant. Dan. |