Therefore, the different views of the earliest primitive history of man, the theory of depravation and that of elevation, do not stand so opposed to one another--the former representing the Biblical and religious, the latter the anti-religious, view of the history--but the question as to the primitive history is not yet solved in that respect; the depravation theory, as well as the elevation theory, indicates rather the _directions_ in which investigation has to put its questions to the archaeological sources. Investigation, on the other hand, has free scope in both directions; and the primitive history of man shows itself to be a realm in which religious and scientific interest, {344} opponents and advocates of the descent theory, can peacefully join hands for common labor. Up to the present, the investigations reach results which seem to fall now more into one, now more into the other, scale of the balance. On the one hand, the older the products of human skill are, the more simple they are; on the other hand, even the oldest remains show man in full possession of that which distinguishes him from the animal, and attests a spiritual life. The reader may think of the before mentioned sketches of the reindeer and mammoth (page 90). If we finally come down to historic times, and to the present, in order to try to draw conclusions from the comparisons of the remotest times of which we have historic knowledge, with the present, as to prehistoric times, we likewise find on the one side vestiges of the lowest barbarism in the past and present; but on the other side we find that the oldest written monuments afford a glance into a perfection of intellectual reflection and into a nobility of moral and religious views which permits us to draw the highest conclusions as to the intellectual worth of earliest mankind. The very oldest records of the Holy Scripture give evidence of this intellectual height; and even the royal programmes of Assyrian monarchs, which the wonderful diligence and ingenuity of recent investigators have deciphered from the cuneiform inscriptions, not only relatively correspond to the height of culture which we find in the ruins of Assyrian palaces, but even, when looked upon absolutely and aside from the morality of conquest which they indulge, are inspired by a nobility of mind, and permeated by a religiousness, which no potentate of recent times would need to be ashamed of. They have {345} been made accessible to the public by the work of Eberhard Schrader: "Die Keilinschriften und das Alte Testament" ("Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament"), Giessen, 1872. Sec. 4. _Providence, Hearing of Prayer, and Miracles._ Before we enter into the special christological realm, we have yet to glance at the realm of the more common relations between God and the creature, as they have found, in faith in a divine providence, in hearing of prayer, and in divine miracles, their reflection in Christian consciousness.