Angels and Insects (14 page)

‘I will praise thee,’ cries the author of the 139th Psalm, ‘for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.’ And the Psalmist continues quite as if he were aware of the current debates about the origin of living creatures and the development of embryos. ‘My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes
did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.’

We have all had these intuitions, these breathings, of awe at
being fearfully and wonderfully made
, and it is our natural instinct to assume a
maker
of such intricacy, which our developed minds may hardly believe to have come about by blind chance. The Psalmist here forestalls the theorists of development by his knowledge of the
perfection of substance
and the
continuous fashioning
which goes to make living beings. He writes earlier of God’s loving care of the unborn infant, in verse 13, ‘For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.’ It is not unreasonable to ask in what way such a Deity differs from that force which Mr Darwin calls Natural Selection, when he writes, ‘It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being …”

Is not this watchful care another way of describing the providences through God’s grace in which we have traditionally been taught to believe? Might we not indeed argue that Mr Darwin’s new understanding of the means by which these providential changes are brought about is in itself a
new providence
contributing both to human advance and development, and to our capacity to wonder at, to know, to further and repair those forces which God has set in motion, and which Mr Richard Owen has described as the ‘continuous operation of ordained becoming’. Our God is not a
Deus Absconditus
, who has left us darkling in a barren waste, nor is He an indifferent Watchmaker, who wound up a spring and looks on without passion as it slowly unwinds itself towards a final inertia. He is a loving craftsman, who constantly
devises new possibilities from the abundant graves and raw materials he gave to them.

We do not have to be Pangloss to believe in beauty and virtue and truth and happiness and above all in fellow-feeling and in love, human and divine. Clearly all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and it is the height of folly, of wishful thinking, to attempt to deduce God from the joyful skipping of spring lambs, or the brightness of buttercups, or even the promise of the rainbow in a thunderous sky, though the writer of Genesis does offer all men the image of the bow set in the cloud as a promise that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. The Bible tells us that the earth is accursed, since the Fall of Man, the Bible tells us that the curse is lifted, in part, after the Flood, the Bible tells us that our own destructive natures may be redeemed,
are
redeemed by the ransom paid by our Lord, Jesus Christ. The face of the earth does not always laugh, even if it speaks God to us through the mouths of stones and flowers, tempests and whirlwinds, or even the lowly diligence of ants and bees. And we may discuss, if we wish, an
amelioration
of our own cursed natures, working itself out in our daily lives, with many a setback, many a struggle, since the day when Our Lord bade us ‘Love our neighbours as ourselves’ and revealed Himself as God of Love as well as of Power and of special Providence.

Let us, like Him, speak in parables. His parables are drawn from the mysteries of that Nature, of which, if we are to believe His Gospel, He is Maker and Sustainer. He speaks to us of the fall of sparrows and the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. He speaks to us—even He—of that wastefulness of Nature which so appals the Laureate, in His parable of the seeds which fell among weeds or on stony ground. If we consider the humble lives of the social insects I think we may discern truths which are
riddling paradigms
for our own understandings. We have been accustomed to think of
altruism
and
self-sacrifice
as
human virtues, essentially human, but this is not apparently so. These little creatures exercise both, in their ways.

It has long been known that amongst the nations both of the bees and of the ants, there is only
one
true female, the Queen, and that the work of the community is carried on by barren females, or nuns, who attend to the feeding, building, and nurturing of the whole society and its city. It has also long been known that the insects themselves seem able to determine the sex of the embryo, or larva, according to the attention they pay to it. Chambers tells us that the preparatory states of the Queen Bee occupy 16 days; those of the neuters 20; and those of the males 24. The bees appear to enlarge the cell of the female larva, make a pyramidal hollow to allow of its assuming a vertical instead of a horizontal position, keep it warmer than other larvae are kept, and feed it with a peculiar kind of food. This care, including the shortening of the embryonic condition, produces a true female, a Queen who is destined, in the noteworthy words of Kirby and Spence ‘to enjoy love, to burn with jealousy and anger, to be incited to vengeance, and to pass her time without labour’. Mr Darwin has confessed to his distress at the savagery with which the jealous Queens watch over, and murder, their emerging sisters in the beehive. He questioned whether this murder of the new-born, this veritable slaughter of the innocents, did not argue that Nature herself was cruel and wasteful. It could conversely be supposed that a special providence lay in the survival of the Queen best fitted to provide the hive with new generations, or the swarm with a new commander. Be that as it may, it is certain that the longer development of the worker produces a very different creature, one, again in Kirby and Spence’s words ‘zealous for the good of the community, a defender of the public rights, enjoying an immunity from the stimulus of sexual appetite and the pains of parturition; laborious, industrious, patient, ingenious, skilful; incessantly engaged in the nurture of the young, in collecting honey and pollen, in elaborating wax, in constructing cells and the like!—paying the most
respectful and assiduous attention to objects which, had its ovaries been developed, it would have hated and pursued with the most vindictive fury till it had destroyed them!’

I do not think it is folly to argue that the society of the bees has developed in the patient nuns who do the work a primitive form of altruism, self-sacrifice, or loving-kindness. The same is even more strikingly true of the sisterhood of ant-workers, who greet each other with great shows of affection and gentle caresses, always offering sips from their chalices of gathered nectar, which they are hurrying to carry to the helpless and dependent inhabitants of their nurseries. The ants too are able to determine, how is not known, the sex of the inhabitants of their nurseries, so that the community is replenished by desirable numbers of workers, males or fertile Queens at various epochs. Their care of their fellows might itself be thought to be a special Providence, if it were thought to be conscious, or a true
moral choice
. Much labour has been expended on attempts to distinguish the voice of authority in these communities—is it the Queen, or the workers, or some more pervasive Spirit of the City, located everywhere and nowhere, that determines these matters?
What
dictates the coherent movement of all the cells in my body? I do not, though I have Will, and Intelligence, and Reason. I grow, I decay, according to laws which I obey and cannot alter. So do the lesser creatures on the earth. How shall we name the Force that directs them? Blind Chance, or loving Providence? We churchmen have always in the past given one answer. Shall we now be daunted? Scientists attempting to ‘explain’ phenomena such as the growth of the ants’ embryos have resorted to the idea of a ‘
forma formativa’
, a Vital Force, residing perhaps in infinitely numerous gemmules. May we not reasonably ask, what lies behind the forming power, the Vital Force, the physics? Some physicists have come to speak of an unknown x or y. Is it not possible that this x or y is the Mystery which orders the doings of ants and men, which moves the sun and the other stars, as Dante recorded, across the Heavens—the Spirit, the Breath of God, Love Himself.

What is it that leads Mankind to yearn for the Divine Reassurance, the certainty of the Divine Care and the organising hand of the Divine Creator and Perpetuator? How should we have had the wit to
devise
such an aweful concept did not our own small minds correspond to some true Presence in the Universe, did we not dimly perceive and even more crucially NEED such a Being? When we see the love of the creatures for their offspring, or the tender gaze of a human mother bent on her helpless infant, which without her loving watchfulness would be quite unable to survive a day of hunger and thirst, do we not
sense
that love is the order of things, of which we are a wonderful part? The Laureate puts the terrible negative questions squarely in his great poem. He allows us to glimpse the new face of a world driven aimlessly by Chance and blind Fate. He presents, with plaintive singing, the possibility that God may be nothing more than our own invention, and Heaven a pious fiction. He gives the devil-born Doubt its full due, and makes his readers tremble with the impotent anxiety which is part of the Spirit of our Age.

In the next poem, Mr Tennyson writes even more strongly of Nature’s cruelty and carelessness, she who cries, ‘I care for nothing, all shall go,’ and of Poor Man:

And how does he answer this terrible indictment? He answers with the
truth of feeling
to which we must not be impervious, though it may seem childishly simple, naive, almost impotent. Can we accept this truth of
feeling
from the depths of our natures, when our intellects have been stunned and blunted by difficult questions?

Was it not a true leading that enabled Mr Tennyson to become again as a little child, and
feel
the Fatherhood of the Lord of Hosts? Was it not significant that the
warm organised cells
of his heart and his circulating blood rose up against the ‘freezing reason’? The infant crying in the night receives not enlightenment, but the warm touch of a fatherly
hand
, and thus believes, thus
lives
his belief. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, in His Image, father and son, son and father, from generation to generation, in mystery and ordained order.