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 today 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 today, 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) BC 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 today to exploded nonsense like Darwin’s Natural Selection, and the imaginary evidence of embryology.
On the whole it is a good thing, this ultraconservative 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 muddleheaded 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
