124 
the miracles of skill and thonght revealed in the composition 
of language.* 
Certainly, recent discoveries as to the high pitch to which 
the civilisations of Babylonia and Heypt had attained in very 
early days tend rather to confirm than to refute this view ; 
and this sets us thinking whether we have not, in many cases, 
been viewing history through an inverted glass, calling the 
comparative decrepitude of races their youth, and their real 
youth old age; whether civilisation, in fact, was not their 
original condition. 
That unrivalled logician, Archbishop Whately, worked out 
the question of “the Origin of Civilisation ”’ very cleverly and 
suggestively in a lecture, delivered in 1854 to the Young 
Men’s Christian Association.t ‘It has been very commonly | 
taken for granted,” he says, “ not only by writers among the 
ancient heathen, but by modern authors, that the savage state 
was the original one, and that mankind, or some portion of 
mankind, gradually raised themselves from it by the unaided 
exercise of their own faculties. I say, taken for granted,” he 
adds, ‘‘ because one does not usually meet with any attempt 
to establish this by proof, or even any distinct statement of 
it; but it is asswmed, as something about which there can be 
no manner of doubt.” ¢ 
But, after reviewing all the testimony of tradition and 
history, he concludes with pointing out that “all agree in one 
thing, in representing civilisation as having been introduced 
(whenever it has been introduced) not from within, but from 
without,’’§—no clear case being adducible of savages, left to 
themselves, having advanced one step. ‘* Hach one of us 
Huropeans,” he adds, ‘‘ whether Christian, Deist, or Atheist, 
is actually a portion of a standing monument of a former 
communication to mankind from some superhuman Being. 
That man could not have made himself, is often appealed to 
as a proof of the agency of a Divine Creator; and that man- 
land could not, in the first instance, have civilised themselves, 
is a proot of the same kind, and of precisely equal strength, 
of the agency of a divine Instructor. It will have occurred 
to you, no doubt, that the conclusions we have arrived at 
agree precisely with what is recorded in the oldest book 
extant.’ || 
In some very valuable and suggestive articles which 
* Pall Mall Gazette on De Maistre, circa 1870. 
+ Publishea by Nisbet & Co., 21, Berners Street, price 3d. 
~ Idem, p. 19. Sub whe, 
ie eae 
