les, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform
historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the
profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms,
that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow
and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into
apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created
perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory. This
is to be understood not only of the state of man before the Fall as
recorded in the two first chapters of Genesis; but every thing in the
Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe,
that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened
from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so
that the earliest ages of the world were not the most infantine and
ignorant to a comprehensive survey, as modern conceit so fondly imagines,
but the most gigantic and the most enlightened. That beautiful but
material and debasing heathenism, with which our Greek and Latin education
has made us so familiar, is only a defaced fragment of the venerable whole
which preceded it, that old and true heathenism of the holy aboriginal
fathers of our race. "There were GIANTS on the earth in those days." We
read this; but who believes it? We ought seriously to consider what it
means, and adopt it _bona fide_ into our living faith of man, and man's
history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval
granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and
around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our
imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood.
Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error.
Antediluvian man--antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler in every
respect, more sublime and more pure than postdiluvian man, and
postdiluvian nature. But mighty energies, when abused, produce mighty
corruptions; hence the gigantic scale of the sins into which the
antediluvian men fell; and the terrible precipitation of humanity which
followed. This is a point of primary importance, in every attempt to
understand how to estimate the value of that world-famous Greek
philosophy, which is commonly represented as the crown and the glory of
the ancient world. All that Pythagoras and Plato ever wro