SECTION TI.

No genealogy, even although reprinted in Moreri, approaches that of Mahomet or Mohammed, the son of Abdallah, the son of Abd'all Moutaleb, the son of Ashem; which Mohammed was, in his younger days, groom of the widow Cadisha, then her factor, then her husband, then a prophet of God, then condemned to be hanged, then conqueror and king of Arabia; and who finally died an enviable death, satiated with glory and with love. The German barons do not trace back their origin beyond Witikind; and our modern French marquisses can scarcely, any of them, show deeds and patents of an earlier date than Charlemagne. But the race of Mahomet, or Mohammed, which still subsists, has always exhibited a genealogical tree, of which the trunk is Adam, and of which the branches reach from Ishmael down to the nobility and gentry who at the present day bear the high title of cousins of Mahomet.

There is no difficulty about this genealogy, no dispute among the learned, no false calculations to be rectified, no contradictions to palliate, no impossibilities to be made possible.

In answer to this you are told, that you are a plebeian (roturier) from all eternity, unless you can produce a regular and complete set of parchments.

You reply that men are equal; that one race cannot be more ancient than another; that parchments, with bits of wax dangling to them, are a recent invention; that there is no reason that compels you to yield to the family of Mahomet, or to that of Confucius; or to that of the Emperors of Japan; or to the royal secretaries of the grand college. Nor can I oppose your opinion by arguments, physical, metaphysical, or moral. You think yourself equal to the dairo of Japan, and I entirely agree with you. All that I would advise you is, that if ever you meet with him, you take good care to be the stronger.

GENESIS.

THE sacred writer having conformed himself to the ideas generally received, and being indeed obliged not to deviate from them, as without such condescension to the weakness and ignorance of those whom he addressed, he would not have been understood, it only remains for us to make some observations on the natural philosophy prevailing in those early periods; for, with respect to theology, we reverence it, we believe in it, and never either dispute or discuss it.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

Your pride cavils against the authenticity of these titles. You tell me that you are descended from Adam as well as the greatest prophet, if Adam was the common father of our race; but that this same Adam was never known by any person, not even by the ancient Arabs themselves; that the name has Thus has the original passage been never been cited except in the books translated, but the translation is not corof the Jews; and that, consequently, rect. There is no one, however slightly you take the liberty of writing down false informed upon the subject, who is not against the high and noble claims of Ma-aware that the real meaning of the word homet or Mohammed. is, "In the beginning the gods made (firent or fit) the heaven and the earth." This reading, moreover, perfectly corresponds with the ancient idea of the Phenicians, who imagined that, in reducing the chaos (chuutereb) into order, God

You add that, in any case, if there has been a first man, whatever his name might be, you are a descendant from him as decidedly as Cadisha's illustrious groom; and that, if there has been no first man, if the human race always ex-employed the agency of inferior deities. isted, as so many of the learned pretend, then you are clearly a gentleman from all eternity.

The Phenicians had been long a powerful people, having a theogony of their own, before the Hebrews became pcs

On the question of the eternity of the world, mankind has always been divided, but never on that of the eternity of matter. From nothing, nothing can proceed, nor into nothing can aught existent return.

sessed of a few cantons of land near nician author Sanconiathon. The Phetheir territory. It is extremely naturalnicians, like every other people, believed to suppose that, when the Hebrews had matter to be eternal. There is not a sinat length formed a small establishment gle author of antiquity who ever reprenear Phenicia, they began to acquire its sented something to have been produced language. At that time their writers from nothing. Even throughout the might, and probably did, borrow the an- whole Bible, no passage is to be found cient philosophy of their masters. Such in which matter is said to have been creis the regular march of the human mind. ated out of nothing. Not, however, that At the time in which Moses is supposed we mean to controvert the truth of such to have lived, were the Phenician phi- creation. It was, nevertheless, a truth losophers sufficiently enlightened to re- not known by the carnal Jews. gard the earth as a mere point in comparison with the infinite multitude of orbs placed by God in the immensity of space, commonly called heaven? The idea so very ancient, and at the same time so utterly false, that heaven was made for earth, almost always prevailed in the minds of the great mass of the people. It would certainly be just as correct and judicious for any person to suppose, if told that God created all the mountains and a single grain of sand, that the mountains were created for that grain of sand. It is scarcely possible that the Phenicians, who were such excellent navigators, should not have had some good astronomers; but the old prejudices generally prevailed, and those old prejudices were very properly spared and indulged by the author of the book of Genesis, who wrote to instruct men in the ways of God, and not in natural philosophy.

"The earth was without form (tohu bohu) and void; darkness rested upon the face of the deep, and the spirit of God moved upon the surface of the waters."

Tohu bohu means precisely chaos, disorder. It is one of those imitative words which are to be found in all languages; as, for example, in the French we have sens, dessus, dessous, tintamarre, trictrac, tonnerre, bombe. The earth was not as yet formed in its present state: the matter existed, but the divine power had not yet arranged it. The spirit of God means literally the breath, the wind, which agitated the waters. The same idea occurs in the Fragments of the Phe

De nilo nihilum, et in uihilum nil posse gigni reverti.

Persius, Sat. iii.

Such was the opinion of all antiquity. "God said let there be light, and there was light; and he saw that the light was good, and he divided the light from the darkness; and he called the light day, and the darkness night; and the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said also, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And God called the firmament heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day, &c. And he saw that it was good."

We begin with examining whether Huet, Bishop of Avranches, Le Clerc, and some other commentators, are not in the right in opposing the idea of those who consider this passage as exhibiting the most sublime eloquence.

Eloquence is not aimed at in any history written by the Jews. The style of the passage in question, like that of all the rest of the work, possesses the most perfect simplicity. If an orator, intend{ing to give some idea of the power of God, employed for that purpose the short and simple expression we are consider

thing but the absence of light, and that there is in fact no light when our eyes receive no sensation of it; but at that period these truths were far from being known.

ing, "He said, let there be light, and there was light;" it would then be sublime. Exactly similar is the passage in one of the psalms, "Dixit, et facta sunt," "He spake, and they were made." It is a trait which, being unique in this place, and introduced purposely in order to create a majestic image, elevates and transports the mind. But, in the instance under examination, the narrative is of the most simple character. The Jewish writer is speaking of light just in the same unambitious manner as of other objects of creation, he expresses himself equally and regularly after every article," and God saw that it was good." Everything is sublime in the course or act of creation, unquestionably, but the creation of light is no more so than that of the herbs{tain reservoirs. These reservoirs could of the field; the sublime is something which soars far from the rest, whereas all is equal throughout the chapter.

But farther, it was another very ancient opinion that light did not proceed from the sun. It was seen diffused throughout the atmosphere, before the rising and after the setting of that star; the sun was supposed merely to give it greater strength and clearness; accordingly the author of Genesis accommodates himself to this popular error, and even states the creation of the sun and moon not to have taken place until four days after the existence of light. It was impossible that there could be a morning and evening before the existence of a sun. The inspired writer deigned, in this instance, to condescend to the gross and wild ideas of the nation. The object of God was not to teach the Jews philosophy. He might have raised their minds to the truth, but he preferred descending to their error. This solution can never be too frequently repeated.

The separation of the light from the darkness is a part of the same system of philosophy. It would seem that night and day were mixed up together, as grains of different species which are easily separable from each other. It is sufficiently known that darkness is no

The idea of a firmament, again, is of the very highest antiquity. The heavens are imagined to be a solid mass, because they always exhibited the same phenomena. They rolled over our heads, they were therefore constituted of the most solid materials. Who could suppose that the exhalations from the land and sea supplied the water descending from the clouds, or compute their corresponding quantities? No Halley then lived to make so curious a calculation. The heavens therefore were conceived to con

be supported only on a strong arch, and as this arch of heaven was actually transparent, it must necessarily have been made of chrystal. In order that the waters above might descend from it upon the earth, sluices, cataracts, and floodgates were necessary, which might be opened and shut as circumstances required. Such was the astronomy of the day; and as the author wrote for Jews, it was incumbent upon him to adopt their gross ideas, borrowed from other people somewhat less gross than themselves.

"God also made two great lights, one to rule the day, the other the night: he also made the stars."

It must be admitted that we perceive throughout the same ignorance of nature. The Jews did not know that the moon shone only with a reflected light. The author here speaks of stars as of mere luminous points, such as they appear, although they are in fact so many suns, having each of them worlds revolving round it. The Holy Spirit, then, accommodated himself to the spirit of the times. If he had said that the sun was a million times larger than the earth, and the moon fifty times smaller, no one would have comprehended him. They appear to us two stars of nearly equal size.

What meaning did the Jews attach to
the expression, let us make man in our
own image?" The same as all antiquity {
attached to it.

"Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum."
Ovid, Melam. i. 82.

considered it probable that the allegory of six days was imitated from that of the the idea to have prevailed in large and six periods. God may have permitted populous empires before he inspired the Jewish people with it. He had undoubtedly permitted other people to invent the arts before the Jews were in possession any one of them.

of

out which watered the garden, and thence "From this pleasant place a river went it was divided into four rivers. One was called Pison, which compassed the whole land of Hivilah, whence cometh gold.. surrounds Ethiopia...... the third is the ...... the second was called Gihon and Tigris, and the fourth the Euphrates."

No images are made but of bodies. No nation ever imagined a God without body, and it is impossible to represent him otherwise. We may indeed say that God is nothing that we are acquainted with, but we can have no idea of what he is. The Jews invariably conceived God to be corporeal, as well as every other people. All the first fathers of the church, also, entertained the same paradise would have contained nearly a According to this version, the earthly belief till they had embraced the ideas third part of Asia and of Africa. The of Plato, or rather until the light of sources of the Euphrates and the Tigris Christianity became more pure. "He created them male and female." } in frightful mountains, bearing no possiare sixty leagues distant from each other, If God, or the secondary or inferior { gods, created mankind, male and female, after their own likeness, it would seem, in that case, as if the Jews believed that God and the gods who so formed them were male and female. It has been a subject of discussion, whether the author means to say that man had originally two sexes, or merely that God made Adam and Eve on the same day. The most natural meaning is, that God formed Adam and Eve at the same time; but this interpretation involves an absolute contradiction to the statement of the woman's being made out of the rib of the man after the seven days were concluded.

ble resemblance to a garden. The river which borders Ethiopia, and which can be no other than the Nile, commences its course at the distance of more than a thousand leagues from the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates; and, if the Pison means the Phasis, it is not a little surprising that the source of a Scythian river, and that of an African one, should be situated on the same spot. therefore look for some other explanation, We must and for other rivers. Every commentator has got up a paradise of his own.

Eden resembles the gardens of Eden at It has been said that the garden of Saana in Arabia Felix, celebrated through“And he rested on the seventh day." very recent people, might be an Arabian out all antiquity; that the Hebrews, a The Phenicians, Chaldeans, and In-horde, and assume to themselves the dians, represented God as having made honour of the most beautiful spot in the the world in six periods, which the an- finest district of Arabia; and that they cient Zoroaster calls the six "Gaham-have always converted to their own purbars," so celebrated among the Persians. poses the ancient traditions of the vast It is beyond all question that these nations possessed a theology before the whom they were in bondage. They were and powerful nations in the midst of Jews inhabited the deserts of Oreb, and not, however, on this account, the less Sinai, and before they could possibly under the divine protection and guidhave any writers. Many writers have ance.

"The Lord hen took the man and

put him into the garden of Eden that man to be alone; let us make him a helphe might cultivate it."

It is very respectable and pleasant for a man to "cultivate his garden," but it must have been somewhat difficult for Adam to have dressed and kept in order a garden of a thousand leagues in length, even although he had been supplied with some assistants. Commentators on this subject, therefore, we again observe, are completely at a loss, and must be content to exercise their ingenuity in conjecture. Accordingly, these four rivers have been described as flowing through numberless different territories.

"Eat not of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil.”

'meet for him."

We naturally expect that the Lord is about to bestow on him a wife; but first he conducts before him all the various tribes of animals. Perhaps the copyist may have committed here an error of transposition.

"And the name which Adam gave to every animal is its true name.'

What we should naturally understand by the true name of an animal, would be a name describing all, or at least, the prin{cipal properties of its species. But this is not the case in any language. In each there are some imitative words, as coq and cocu in the Celtic, which bear some slight similarity to the notes of the cock and the cuckoo; tintamarre, tricktrack, in French; alali in Greek; lupus in Latim, &c. But these imitative words are exceedingly few. Moreover, if Adam had thus thoroughly known the properties of various animals, he must either

It is not easy to conceive that there ever existed a tree which could teach good and evil as there are trees that bear pears and apricots. And, besides, the question is asked, why is God unwilling that man should know good and evil? Would not his free access to this know-have previously eaten of the fruit of the ledge, on the contrary, appear (if we may venture to use such language) more worthy of God, and far more necessary to man? To our weak reason it would seem more natural and proper for God to command him to eat largely of such fruit; but we must bring our reason under subjection, and acquiesce with humility and simplicity in the conclusion that God is to be obeyed.

"If thou shalt eat thereof, thou shalt die."

Nevertheless, Adam eat of it and did not die; on the contrary, he is stated to have lived on for nine hundred and thirty years. Many of the fathers considered the whole matter as an allegory. In fact, it might be said, that all other animals have no knowledge that they shall die, but that man, by means of his reason, has such knowledge. This reason is the tree; of knowledge which enables him to foresee his end. This, perhaps, is the most rational interpretation that can be given. We venture not to decide positively.

"The Lord said also, it is not good for

55

tree of knowledge, or it would apparently have answered no end for God to have interdicted him from it. He must have already known more than the Royal Society of London, and the Academy of the Sciences.

It may be remarked, that this is the first time the name of Adam occurs in the book of Genesis. The first man, according to the ancient Brachmans, who were prodigiously anterior to the Jews, { was called Adimo, a son of the earth, and his wife Procris, life. This is recorded in the Veidam, in the history of the second formation of the world. Adam and Eve expressed perfectly the same meanings in the Phenician languagea new evidence of the holy spirit's conforming itself to commonly received ideas.

"When Adam was asleep God took one of his ribs and put flesh instead thereof; and of the rib which he had taken from Adam he formed a woman, and he brought the woman to Adam.'

In the previous chapter, the Lord had