When it was objected to Leibnitz "that there is nothing in the intelligence that has not first been in the sense," Leibnitz replied, "if not the intelligence itself." [Footnote 25]

[Footnote 25: Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu.—Nisi intellectus ipse.]

In the answer of Leibnitz I will change but a single word, and substitute for intelligence, soul. Soul is a term more comprehensive and more complete than intelligence; it embraces everything in the human being that is not body and matter; it is not the mere intelligence, a special faculty of man; it is all the intellectual and moral man.

The soul possesses itself and carries with it into life native faculties and an inborn light: these manifest and develop themselves more and more as they come into relation with the exterior world; but they had still an existence prior to those relations, and they exercise an important influence upon what results. The external world does not create nor essentially change the intellectual and moral being that has just come into life, but it opens to it a stage where that being acts in accordance at once with its proper nature, and the conditions and influences in the midst of which the action takes place. The hypothesis of a statue endowed with sensibility is a contradiction; in seeking to explain man's first growth, it loses sight of the entire intellectual and moral being.

When, as I said before, man first entered the world, he did not enter it, he could not enter it, as a new-born babe, with the mere breath of life; he was created full grown, with instincts and faculties complete in their power and capable of immediate action. We must either deny the creation and be driven to monstrous hypotheses, or admit that the human being who now develops himself slowly and laboriously, was at his first appearance mature in body and in mind.

The creation implies then the Revelation, a revelation which lighted man at his entrance into the world, and qualified him from that very moment to use his faculties and his instincts. Do we, can we, picture to ourselves the first man, the first human couple, with a complete physical development, and yet without the essential conditions of intellectual activity, physically strong and morally a nonentity, the body of twenty years and the soul in the first hour of infancy? Such a fact is self-contradictory, and impossible of conception.

What was the positive extent of this primal revelation, the necessary attendant upon creation, which occurred in the first relation of God with man? No man can say. I open the book of Genesis and there I read:

"And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. … Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." [Footnote 26]

[Footnote 26: Genesis ii. 15-24.]

According, then, to the Bible, the primitive revelation essentially bore upon the three points,—marriage, language, and the duty of man's obedience to God his Creator: Adam received at the hand of God the moral law of his liberty, the companion of his life, and the faculty by which he was enabled to name the creatures that were around him: in other words, the three sources of religion, of family, and of science were immediately unclosed to him. It is not necessary here to enter upon any of the questions which have been raised, as to the human origin of language, the primitive language, or the formation of families, with their influence upon the great organisation of society: the limits of the primitive revelation cannot be determined scientifically; the fact of the revelation itself is certain. This is the light which lighted the first man from his first entrance upon life, and without which it is impossible to conceive that he could have survived.

The primitive revelation did not abandon mankind on its development and dispersion; it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and permanent revelation. The light which had lighted the first man spread amongst all nations and throughout all ages, assuming the character of ideas, universal and uncontested; of instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No nation has been without this light, none left to its own unassisted efforts to grope its way through the darkness of life. Let not the human understanding pride itself too much upon its works; the glory does not belong to it alone: what it has accomplished it has accomplished by aid of the primitive principles received from God; in all his works and all his progress man has had for point of departure and support that primitive revelation. All the grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions, which have governed the world, whatever intermixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may have contained, have preserved a trace of the fundamental verities which were the dowry of humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no portion of the human race; and not less amidst the errors into which it has fallen, than in the noble developments which constitute its glory, we recognise signs of the primitive teaching derived from its Divine Author.

After the revelation made to the first man, and in the midst of the general revelation diffused over all mankind, a great event occurs in history: a special revelation takes place, and has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable nation, that had been shut in during sixteen centuries in a little corner of the world; and it was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that revelation proceeded to enlighten and to subdue, according to the predictions of its Author, all the human race.

A man of an imagination as fertile as his knowledge is profound, who, with an admirable candour has in his works associated hypothesis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the University of GÖttingen, has recently thus characterised this event:—"The history of the old Jewish people is fundamentally the history of the true religion, proceeding from step to step to its complete development, rising through all kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme victory, and finally manifesting itself in all its majesty and power, in order to spread irresistibly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations." [Footnote 27]

[Footnote 27: H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. 2nd ed., vol. i. p. 9. GÖttingen, 1851. ]

How is the great event thus characterised by M. Ewald proved? By what marks can we distinguish the Divine origin of this special revelation that became the Christian religion? What does it affirm itself in support of its claim to the moral conquest of mankind?

At the very outset, in proving her dogmas and precepts to have come from God, the Christian revelation asserts that the documents in which it is written are themselves of divine origin. The divine inspiration of the sacred volume is the first basis of the Christian Faith, the external title of Christianity to authority over souls. What is the full import of this title? What the signification of the inspiration of the sacred volumes?