The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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Of these matters, thus curtly: it is time, in a short recapitulation, to
reflect, that, from foregoing causes, mysteries were probable around the
throne of heaven: and, as I have attempted to show, the mystery of
imperfection, a concrete not an abstract, was likely to have sprung out
of any creature universe. Reason perceives that a Gordion knot was
likely to have become entangled; in the intricate complexities of
abounding good to be mingled needfully with its own deficiencies,
corruptions, and perversions: and this having been shown by Reason as
anteriorly probable, its difficult involvements are now since cut by the
sword of conquering Faith.

COSMOGONY.

These deep themes having been descanted on, however from their nature
unsatisfactorily and with whatever human weakness, let us now endeavour
mentally to transport ourselves to a period immediately antecedent to
our own world's birth. We should then have been made aware that a great
event was about to take place; whereat, from its foreseen consequences,
the hierarchies of heaven would be prompt to shout for joy, and the holy
ones of God to sing for gratitude. It was no common case of a creation;
no merely onemore orb, of third-rate unimportance, amongst the million
others of higher and more glorious praise: but it was a globe and a race
about to be unique in character and fate, and in the far-spread results
of their existence. On it and of its family was to be contrived the
scene, wherein, to the admiration of the universe, God himself in Person
was going visibly to make head against corruption in creation, and for
ever thus to quench that possibility again: wherein He was marvellously
to invent and demonstrate how Mercy and Truth should meet together, how
Righteousness and Peace should kiss each other. There, was going to be
set forth the wonderfully complicated battle-plan, by which, force
countervailing force, and design converging all things upon one fixed
point, Good, concrete in the creature, should overwhelm not without
strife and wounds Evil concrete in the creature, and all things, "even
the wicked," should be seen harmoniously blending in the glory of the
attributes of God. The mythologic Pan, [Greek: to pan] the great
Universal All, was deeply interested in the struggle: for the seed of
the woman was to bruise the serpent's head; not merely as respected the
small orb about to be, but concerning heaven itself, the unbounded
"haysh hamaim," wherefrom dread Lucifer was thus to be ejected. On the
earth, a mere planet of humble lustre, which the prouder suns around
might well despise, was to be exhibited this noble and analogous result;
the triumph of a lower intelligence, such as man, over a higher
intelligence, such as angel: because, the former race, however frail,
however weak, were to find their nature taken into God, and should have
for their grand exemplar, leader and brother, the Very Lord of all
arrayed in human guise; while the latter, the angelic fallen mass, in
spite of all their pristine wisdom and excellency, were to set up as
their captain him, who may well and philosophically be termed their
Adversary.

This dark being, probably the mightiest of all mere creatures as the
embodiment of corrupted good and perversion of an archangelic wisdom,
was about to be suffered to fall victim to his own overtopping
ambitions, and to drag with him a third part of the heavenly host--some
tributary monarchs of the stars: thus he, and those his colleagues,
should become a spectacle and a warning to all creatures else; to stand
for spirits' reading in letters of fire a deeply burnt-in record how
vast a gulf there is between the Maker and the made; how impassable a
barrier between the derived intelligence and its infinite Creator. Such
an unholy leader in rebellion against good--let us call him _A_ or _B_,
or why not for very euphony's sake Lucifer and Satanas?--such a
corrupted excellence of heaven was to meet his final and inevitable
disgrace to all eternity on the forthcoming battle-field of earth. Would
it not be probable then that our world, soon to be fashioned and stocked
with its teeming reasonable millions, should concentrate to itself the
gaze of the universe, and, from the deeds to be done in it, should
arrogate towards man a deep and fixed attention: that "the morning stars
should sing together, and all the sons of God should shout for joy." Let
us too, according to the power given to us, partake of such attention
antecedently in some detail: albeit, as always, very little can be
tracked of the length and breadth of our theme.

What would probably be the nature of such world and of such creatures,
in a physical point of view? and what, in a moral point of view? It is
not necessary to divide these questions: for the one so bears upon the
other, or rather the latter so directs and pervades the former, that we
may briefly treat of both as one.

The first probability would be, that, as the creature Man so to be
abased and so to be exalted must be a responsible and reasonable being,
every thing--with miraculous exceptions just enough to prove the
rule--every thing around him should also be responsible and reasonable.
In other words, that, with such exceptions as before alluded to, the
whole texture of this world should bear to an inquisitive intellect the
stamp of cause and effect: whilst for the mass, such cause and effect
should be so little intrusive, that their easier religion might
recognise God in all things immediately, rather than mediately. For
instance: take the cases of stone, and of coal; the one so needful for
man's architecture, the other for his culinary warmth. Now, however
simple piety might well thank the Maker for having so stored earth with
these for necessary uses; they ought, to a more learned, though not less
pious ken, to seem not to have been created by an effort of the Great
Father _qua stone_, or _qua coal_. Such a view might satisfy the
ordinary mind: but thinkers would see no occasion for a miracle; when
Christ raises Lazarus from the dead, it would have been a philosophical
fault to have found the grave-clothes and swathing bandages ready
loosened also. Unassisted man can do that: and unhelped common causes
can generate stone and coal. The deposits of undated floods, the
periodical currents of lava, the still and stagnant lake, and the
furious up-bursting earthquake; all these would be called into play, and
not the unrequired, I had almost said unreasonable, energies, which we
call miracle. An agglutination of shells, once peopled with life; a
crystallized lump of segregate minerals, once in a molten state; a mass
of carbonated foliage and trunks of tropical trees, buried by long
changes under the soil, whereover they had once waved greenly luxuriant;
these, and no other, should have been man's stone and coal. This
instance affects the reasonableness of such material creation. Take
another, bearing upon its analogous responsibilities. As there was to be
warred in this world the contest between good and evil, it would be
expectable that the crust of man's earth, anteriorly to man's existence
on it, should be marked with some traces that the evil, though newly
born so far as might regard man's own disobedience, nevertheless had
existed antecedently. In other words: it was probable that there should
exist geological evidences of suffering and death: that the gigantic
ichthyosaurus should be found fixed in rock with his cruel jaws closed
upon his prey: that the fearful iguanodon should leave the tracks of
having desolated a whole region of its reptile tribes: that volcanoes
should have ravaged fair continents prolific of animal and vegetable
life: that, in fine, though man's death came by man's sin, yet that
death and sin were none of man's creating: he was only to draw down upon
his head a preexistent wo, an ante-toppling rock. Observe then, that
these geological phenomena are only illustrations of my meaning: and
whether such parables be true or false, the argument remains the same:
we never build upon the sand of simile, but only use it here and there
for strewing on the floor. Still, I will acknowledge that the
introduction of such fossil instances appears to me wisely thrown in as
affects their antecedent probability, because ignorant comments upon
scriptural cosmogony have raised the absurdest objections against the
truth of scriptural science. There is not a tittle of known geological
fact, which is not absolutely reconcilable with Genesis and Job. But
this is a word by the way: although aimed not without design against one
of the poor and paltry weak-holds of the infidel.

ADAM.

Remembering, then, that these are probabilities, and that the whole
treatise purports to be nothing but a sketch, and not a finished
picture, we have suggestively thus thrown out that the material world,
man's home as man, was likely to have been prepared, as we posteriorly
know it to be. Now, what of man's own person, circumstances, and
individuality? Was it likely that the world should be stocked at once
with many several races, or with one prolific seed? with a specimen of
every variety of the genus man, or with the one generic type capable of
forming those varieties?--Answer. One is by far the likelier in itself,
because one thing must needs be more probable than many things:
additionally; Wisdom and Power are always economical, and where one will
suit the purpose, superfluities are rejected. That this one seed,
covering with its product a various globe under all imaginable
differences of circumstance and climate, should, in the lapse of ages,
generate many species of the genus Man, was antecedently probable. For
example, morality, peace and obedience would exercise transforming
powers: their opposites the like in an opposite way. We can well fancy a
mild and gentle race, as the Hindoo, to spring from the former
educationals: and a family with flashing eyes and strongly-visaged
natures, as the Malay, from a state of hatred, war, and license. We can
well conceive that a tropical sun should carbonize some of that tender
fabric the skin, adding also swift blood and fierce passions: while an
arctic climate would induce a sluggish, stunted race. And, when to these
considerations we add that of promiscuous unions, we arrive at the just
likelihood that the whole family of man, though springing from one root,
should, in the course of generations, be what now we see it.

Further. How should this prolific original, the first man, be created?
and for a name let us call him Adam; a justly-chosen name enough, as
alluding to his medium colour, ruddiness. Should he have been cast upon
the ground an infant, utterly helpless, requiring miraculous aid and
guidance at every turn? Should he be originated in boyhood, that hot and
tumultuous time, when the creature is most rash, and least qualified for
self-government? or should he be first discerned as an adult, in his
prime, equal alike to obedience and rule, to moral control and moral
energy?

Add also here; is it probable there would be any needless interval
placed to proecreations? or rather, should not such original seed be able
immediately to fulfil the blank world call upon him, and as the
greatly-teeming human father be found fitted from his birth to propagate
his kind? The questions answer themselves.

Again. Should this first man have been discovered originally surrounded
with all the appliances of an after-civilization, clad, and housed, and
rendered artificial? nor rather, in a noble and naturally royal aspect
appear on the stage of life as king of the natural creation, sole warder
of a garden of fruits, with all his food thus readily concocted, and an
eastern climate tempered to his nakedness?

Now, as to the solitariness of this one seed. From what we have already
mused respecting God's benevolence, it would seem probable that the
Maker might not see it good that man should be alone. The seed,
originally one, proved (as was likely) to resemble its great parent,
God, and to be partitionable, or reducible into persons; though with
reasonable differences as between creature and Creator. Woman--Eve, the
living or life-giving--was likely to have sprung out of the composite
seed, Man, in order to companionship and fit society. Moreover, it were
expectable that in the pattern creature, composite man, there should be
involved some apt, mysterious typification of the same creature, after a
fore-known fall restored, as in its perfect state of reunion with its
Maker. _A posteriori_, the figurative notion is, that the Redeemed
family, or mystical spouse, is incorporated in her husband, the
Redeemer: not so much in the idea of marriage, as (taking election into
view) of a coecreation; as it were rib of rib, and life woven into life,
not copulated or conjoined, but immingled in the being. This is a
mystery most worthy of deep searching; a mystery deserving philosophic
care, not less than the more unilluminate enjoyment of humble and
believing Christians. I speak concerning Christ and his church.

THE FALL.

There is a special fitness in the fact, long since known and now to be
perceived probable, that if mankind should fail in disobedience, it
should rather be through the woman than through the man. Because, the
man, _qua man_, and the deputed head of all inferior creatures, was
nearer to his Creator, than the woman; who, _qua woman_, proceeded out
of man. She was, so to speak, one step further from God, _ab origine_,
than man was; therefore, more liable to err and fall away. To my own
mind, I confess, it appears that nothing is more anteriorly probable
than the plain, scriptural story of Adam and Eve: so simple that the
child delights in it; so deep that the philosopher lingers there with an
equal, but more reasonable joy.

For, let us now come to the probabilities of a temptation; and a fall;
and what temptation; and how ordered.

The heavenly intelligences beheld the model-man and model-woman,
rational beings, and in all points "very good." The Adversary panted for
the fray, demanding some test of the obedience of this new, favourite
race. And the Lord God was willing that the great controversy, which he
fore-knew, and for wise purposes allowed, should immediately commence.
Where was the use of a delay? If you will reply, To give time to
strengthen Adam's moral powers: I rejoin, he was made with more than
enough of strength infused against any temptation not entering by the
portal of his will: and against the open door of will neither time nor
habits can avail. Moreover, the trial was to be exceedingly simple; no
difficult abstinence, for man might freely eat of every thing but one;
no natural passion tempted; no exertion of intelligence requisite. Adam
lived in a garden; and his Maker, for proof of reasonable obedience,
provides the most easy and obvious test of it--do not eat that apple.
Was it, in reality, an improbable test; an unsuitable one? Was it not,
rather, the likeliest in itself, and the fittest as addressed to the
new-born, rational animal, which imagination could invent, or an amiable
fore-knowledge of all things could desire? Had it been to climb some
arduous height without looking back, or on no account to gaze upon the
sun, how much less apt and easy of obedience! Thus much for the test.

Now, as to the temptation and its ordering. A creature, to be tempted
fairly, must be tempted by another equal or lower creature; and through
the senses. If mere spirit strives with spirit, plus matter, the strife
is unequal: the latter is clogged; he has to fight in the net of
Retiarius. But if both are netted, if both are spirit plus matter, (that
is, material creatures,) there is no unfairness. Therefore, it would
seem reasonable that the Adversary in person should descend from his
mere spirituality into some tangible and humbled form. This could not
well be man's, nor the semblance of man's: for the first pair would well
know that they were all mankind: and, if the Lord God himself was
accustomed to be seen of them as in a glorified humanity, it would be
manifestly a moral incongruity to invest the devil in a similar form. It
must, then, be the shape of some other creature; as a lion, or a lamb,
or--why not a serpent? Is there any improbability here? and not rather
as apt an avatar of the sinuous and wily rebel, the dangerous,
fascinating foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance
could invent? The plain fact is, that Reason--given keenness--might have
guessed this also antecedently a likelihood.

A few words more on other details probable to the temptation. Wonderful
as it may seem to us with our present experience, in the case of the
first woman it would scarcely excite her astonishment to be accosted in
human phrase by one of the lower creatures; and in no other way could
the tempter reach her mind. Much as Milton puts it, Eve sees a beautiful
snake, eating, not improbably, of the forbidden apple. Attracted by a
natural curiosity, she would draw near, and in a soft sweet voice the
serpent, _i.e._ Lucifer in his guise, would whisper temptation. It was
likely to have been keenly managed. Is it possible, O fair and favoured
mistress of this beautiful garden, that your Maker has debarred you from
its very choicest fruit? Only see its potencies for good: I, a poor
reptile, am instantly thereby endued with knowledge and the privilege of
speech. Am I dead for the eating?--ye shall not surely die; but shall
become as gods yourselves; and this your Maker knoweth.

The marvellous fruit, invested thus with mystery, and tinctured with
the secret charm of a thing unreasonably, nay, harmfully, forbidden,
would then be allowed silently to plead its own merits. It was good for
food: a young creature's first thought. It was pleasant to the eyes:
addressing a higher sense than mere bodily appetite, than mental
predilection for form and colour which marks fine breeding among men. It
was also to be desired to make one wise; here was the climax, the great
moral inducement which an innocent being might well be taken with;
irrespectively of the one qualification that this wisdom was to be
plucked in spite of God. Doubtless, it were probable, that had man not
fallen, the knowledge of good would never have been long withheld: but
he chose to reap the crop too soon, and reaped it mixed with tares,
good, and evil.

I need not enlarge, in sermon form, upon the theme. It was probable that
the weaker creature, Woman, once entrapped, she would have charms enough
to snare her husband likewise: and the results thus perceived to have
been likely, we have long since known for fact. That a depraved
knowledge should immediately occasion some sort of clothing to be
instituted by the great moral Governor, was likely: and there would be
nothing near at hand, in fact nothing else suitable, but the skins of
beasts. There is also a high probability that some sort of slaying
should take place instantly on the fall, by way of reference to the
coming sacrifice for sin; and for a type of some imputed righteousness.
God covered Man's evil nakedness with the skins of innocent slain
animals: even so, Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and
whose sin is covered.

With respect to restoration from any such fall. There seems a remarkable
prior probability for it, if we take into account the empty places in
heaven, the vacant starry thrones which sin had caused to be untenanted.
Just as, in after years, Israel entered into the cities and the gardens
of the Canaanite and other seven nations, so it was anteriorly likely,
would the ransomed race of Men come to be inheritors of the mansions
among heavenly places, which had been left unoccupied by the fallen host
of Lucifer. There was a gap to be filled: and probably there would be
some better race to fill it.

THE FLOOD.

Themes like those past and others still to come, are so immense, that
each might fairly ask a volume for its separate elucidation. A few
seeds, pregnant with thought, are all that we have here space, or time,
or power to drop beside the world's highway. The grand outlines of our
race command our first attention: we cannot stop to think and speak of
every less detail. Therefore, now would I carry my companion across the
patriarchal times at once to the era of the Deluge. Let us speculate, as
hitherto, antecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic
prior state.

If, as we have seen probable, evil (a concretion always, not an
abstraction) made some perceptible ravages even in the unbounded sphere
of a heavenly creation, how much more rapid and overwhelming would its
avalanche (once ill-commenced) be seen, when the site of its infliction
was a poor band of men and women prisoned on a speck of earth. How
likely was it that, in the lapse of no long time, the whole world should
have been "corrupt before God, and filled with wickedness." How
probable, that taking into account the great duration of pristine human
life, the wicked family of man should speedily have festered up into an
intolerable guiltiness. And was this dread result of the primal curse
and disobedience to be regarded as the Adversary's triumph? Had this
Accuser--the Saxon word is Devil--had this Slanderer of God's attribute
then really beaten Good? or was not rather all this swarming sin an
awful vindication to the universe of the great need-be that God
unceasingly must hold his creature up lest he fall, and that out of Him
is neither strength nor wisdom? Was Deity, either in Adam's case or
this, baffled--nor rather justified? Was it an experiment which had
really failed; nor rather one which, by its very seeming failure, proved
the point in question, the misery of creatures when separate from God?
Yea, the evil one was being beaten down beneath his very trophies in sad
Tarpeian triumph: through conquest and his children's sins heightening
his own misery.

Let us now advert to a few of the anterior probabilities affecting this
evil earth's catastrophe. It is not competent to us to trench upon such
ulterior views as are contained in the idea of types relatively to
anti-types. Neither will we take the fanciful or poetical aspect of
coming calamity, that earth, befouled with guilt, was likely to be
washed clean by water. It is better to ask, as more relevant, in what
other way more benevolent than drowning could, short of miracle, the
race be made extinct? They were all to die in their sins, and swell in
another sphere the miserable hosts of Satan. There was no hope for them,
for there was no repentance. It was infinitely probable that God's
long-suffering had worn out every reasonable effort for their
restoration. They were then to die; but how?--in the least painful
manner possible. Intestine wars, fevers, famines, a general burning-up
of earth and all its millions, were any of these preferable sorts of
death to that caused by the gradual rise of water, with hope of life
accorded still even to the last gurgle? Assuredly, if "the tender
mercies of the wicked are cruel," the judgments of the Good one are
tempered well with mercy.

Moreover, in the midst of this universal slaughter there was one good
seed to be preserved: and, as Heaven never works a miracle where common
cause will suit the present purpose, it would have been inconsistent to
have extirpated the wicked by any such means as must demonstrate the
good to have been saved only by super-human agency.

The considerations of humanity, and of the divine less-intervention, add
that of the natural and easy agency of a long-commissioned comet. No
"_Deus e machina_" was needed for this effort: one of His ministers of
flaming fire was charged to call forth the services of water. This was
an easy and majestic interference. Ever since man fell--yea, ages before
it--the omniscient eye of God had foreseen all things that should
happen: and his ubiquity had, possibly from The Beginning, sped a comet
on its errant way, which at a calculated period was to serve to wash the
globe clean of its corruptions: was to strike the orbit of earth just in
the moment of its passage, and disturbing by attraction the fountains of
the great deep, was temporarily to raise their level. Was not this a
just, a sublime, and a likely plan? Was it not a merciful, a perfect,
and a worthy way? Who should else have buried the carcases on those
fierce battle-fields, or the mouldering heaps of pestilence and
famine?--But, when at Jehovah's summons, heaving to the comet's mass,
the pure and mighty sea rises indignant from its bed, by drowning to
cleanse the foul and mighty land--how easy an engulfing of the corpses;
how awful that universal burial; how apt their monumental epitaph
written in water, "The wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot
rest;" how dread the everlasting requiem chanted for the whelmed race by
the waves roaring above them: yea, roaring above them still! for in
that chaotic hour it seems probable to reason that the land changed
place with ocean; thus giving the new family of man a fresh young world
to live upon.