The Eliminator Part 8

Let us now take the best-remembered incident in the life of Abraham, the attempted murder and the rescue of his son Isaac, and see what will come of applying the symbolic instead of the literal interpretation to it.

Let it be noted that this is not an original story. The ancient Hindoos have one like it. King Haris-candra had no son. He prayed for one, and promised that if one should be born to him he would sacrifice him to the G.o.ds. One was born, and he named him Rohita. One day his father told him of his promise to Varuna to offer him in sacrifice. The son bought a subst.i.tute, and when he was about to be immolated he was marvellously rescued. Then there is the well-known similar story written by the Phnician Sanchoniathon

thirteen hundred years before our era. Then there is the Grecian story of Agamemnon, to whom, when about to sacrifice his daughter, a stag was furnished by a G.o.ddess as a subst.i.tute. There is another Grecian fable in which a maiden was about to be sacrificed, and as the priest uplifted his knife to shed her blood the victim suddenly disappeared, and a goat of uncommon beauty stood in her place as a subst.i.tute. Another story runs thus: In Sparta the maiden Helena was about to be immolated on the altar of the G.o.ds, when an eagle carried off the knife of the priest and laid it upon the neck of a heifer, which was sacrificed in her stead.

Similar stories might be produced from among many nations in the most ancient times, long before the Jews picked this up in Babylon and rewrote it, with modifications, so as to apply it to their mythical progenitor; for this fable of Abraham's offering was not written until after their return from their Babylonish captivity-much nearer our own time than is generally suspected.

Regarded as an historic account of a real transaction, this story of the attempted sacrifice of a beloved son by a venerable father is shocking in the extreme, dishonoring alike to G.o.d and to Abraham. A good G.o.d could not have done such an unnatural and cruel thing. He had no occasion to try Abraham to find out how much faith he had. He knew that already. Regarded as an astrological allegory, it is ingenious and contains a moral lesson, to wit: obedience to the voice of G.o.d and the hope of deliverance in the hour of extreme emergency. The defect in the story is, that G.o.d could trifle with a loving child, and pretend to require him to break one of his own commandments, "Thou shalt not kill,"

and subject him to its own penalty, "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." It would not have availed Abraham to plead that G.o.d told him to murder his son, any more than it availed the Poca.s.set crank when he pleaded that G.o.d had directed him to murder his little daughter. The State of Ma.s.sachusetts sent the semi-lunatic to a safe place of confinement. This story of Abraham and Isaac has led to scores and scores of murders of children by their fathers, just as the pa.s.sage in the Old Testament, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,"

has been pleaded in justification of the cool, deliberate murder of mult.i.tudes of men, women, and children on the charge of witchcraft.

The literal interpretation of what is called infallible Scripture has been the most bitter curse to deluded, priest-ridden humanity. It is the "stock in trade" of ignorant and selfish ecclesiastics to-day.

Let us look a little more closely at this Abraham-and-Isaac myth.

Abraham was the personification of Saturn, the G.o.d of Time, while Isaac was the personification of the Sun. Abraham took Isaac up to Hebron-which means _union or alliance_, and clearly indicates a union of the ecliptic and equinoctial line-the very point at which the Ram of the vernal equinox pa.s.sed by, or, as might be poetically said, was caught in a cloud or bush; so that the whole story was written long ages before in the celestial heavens, and emblazoned in the skies at the return of each vernal equinox. Writers on astro-theology point out details at great length to support the symbolic interpretation, but it is enough for pur purpose to merely give the keynote. Let the fact be specially noted that the names of the patriarchs have an astrological meaning,

and that the twelve sons of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham, who became the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel, have distinctly astrological characters, fully indicated in Jacob's dying blessing on his sons (Gen.

49) and in the corresponding "Song of Moses" (Deut. 33), on the banner carried by the different tribes in their mythical march from Egypt to Canaan; and that on the breastplate of the officiating high priest the jewels correspond to the celestial signs of the solar zodiac; and although Jacob had children by several different women and was a first-cla.s.s Mormon, his twelve sons are made to correspond with the twelve months of the year and the twelve signs of the zodiac. This fact is admitted by the orthodox author of _The Gospel in the Stars_. His daughters are not considered worthy of notice, as that would have spoiled the riddle. The philology and etymology of the name _Jacob_ has suggestions of the serpent; and from his history he must have been a snaky fellow from the first to the last. He was born with his hand upon his brother's "heel," and he managed to cheat him out of his share of his mother's affections, and lied to his father, and conspired with his mother to rob Esau, his brother, of his "blessing." The stories of Laban and Leah and Rachel all conform to the symbolic rather than the literal hypothesis, as well as Jacob's vision of the ladder, and his wrestling-match with the angel, when he openly obtained the astrological name of the children of Saturn-Israel. It must be admitted that the allegorical hypothesis relieves the patriarchs of the charge of many mean things, such as the heartless manner in which Abram treated Hagar when Sarah got jealous, and the manner in which he treated Sarah herself when he lied to the king through a selfish cowardice and gave his wife over to the l.u.s.ts of the monarch Abimelech, who was (or one bearing his name) deceived by Isaac in regard to Rebekah by a similar trick (Gen.

26:1). Lot, the nephew of Abraham, was guilty of a meaner and more unmanly act when he himself proposed to give over his two virgin daughters to the worse than beastly l.u.s.ts of a howling mob, to protect two angels who were guests at his tent (Gen. 19:1-11).

But theologians will never willingly admit that the Abraham of Genesis was a myth. They well know the logical conclusion. They would have to give up the "Abrahamic covenant," which is the basis of sacerdotalism.

When Professor Driver, of the orthodox University of Oxford, recently admitted only by implication that Abraham may have had no real personal existence, and claimed that such hypothesis would not be injurious to religion, his article was rejected and suppressed by the editor of an orthodox paper in Philadelphia as dangerous. But to a.s.sume that all the princ.i.p.al actors of Genesis and some other books were impersonations, not persons, would not destroy the good things they are alleged to have said and done. It is no more necessary to insist upon the real personality of Abraham than to insist upon the literal existence of Faithful and Great-Heart and other impersonations in _Pilgrim's Progress_. n.o.body insists that the characters in the parables accredited to Jesus must be taken in a literal sense. And yet it may be admitted that the fictions of Scripture may have been suggested by some persons and facts, just as in modern novels there generally is some person who stands for the original of the story. This is eminently so in the novels of d.i.c.kens and D'Israeli. Nevertheless, it is difficult to doubt that the princ.i.p.al characters of the Old Testament are mythical, pure and simple, as we find the originals in the older scriptures of different nations, confessedly founded upon the solar and other forms of Nature-wors.h.i.+p. The feet is, that the only rational way to explain the marvellous stories of the Hebrew Scriptures is by the well-known methods of ancient symbolism.

Let us now merely glance at some other Old-Testament fables.

_Noah_ and his Deluge are mainly mythical, as this story is almost a literal copy of the Chaldean, though found substantially in the writings of many other nations. It readily fits the allegorical method of interpretation in almost every particular. The Chaldean account as written by Berosus, and found recently by the late George Smith of the British Museum on the clay tablets, is so much like the story in Genesis that the latter must have been copied from the former; and the slight variations in the two narratives are no greater than might have been expected as between Chaldea and Palestine. The Jews obtained it from Babylon, as there is no mention made of this miracle in any book of the Bible written before the Captivity. The books of Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, Judges, Kings, etc. are silent on this subject. Josephus defended the Noachian Deluge on the sole ground that an account of it was held by the Chaldeans, never pretending that the Chaldean account was taken from the Jewish record.

But it is useless to dwell on the story of a universal deluge of water.

It is in the light of modern science physically impossible and absurd; and such men as Buckland, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and Hitchc.o.c.k, with many other distinguished Christian scientists, give up the doctrine of a universal deluge while claiming a partial one. And here, again, the ancient astronomy comes in with an explanation of partial floods of waters by the natural results of the "precession of the equinoxes," in which, at certain periods during the change of the polar axis of the earth, great physical convulsions must follow, with wide eruptions of water, making a partial overflow and suggesting the idea of a universal deluge. Four such cataclysms must have occurred while the sun was making one journey through the twelve zodiacal constellations. Prof. Huxley has recently well said: "But the voice of archaeology and historical criticism still has to be heard, and it gives forth no uncertain sound.

The marvellous recovery of the records of an antiquity far superior to any that can be ascribed to the Pentateuch, which has been effected by the decipherers of cuneiform characters, has put us in possession of a series once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which has a most remarkable bearing upon the question of the trustworthiness of the narrative of the Flood. It is established that for centuries before the a.s.serted migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox interpreters of the Pentateuch, took place after the year 2000 b. c.) Lower Mesopotamia was the seat of a civilization in which art and science and literature had attained a development formerly unsuspected, or, if there were faint reports of it, treated as fabulous.

And it is also no matter of speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of this people contain versions of a long epic poem, one of the twelve books of which tells the story of a deluge which in a number of its leading features corresponds to the story attributed to Berosus, no less than with the story given in Genesis, with curious exactnesss.

"Looking at the convergence of all these lines of evidence leads to the one conclusion-that the story of the Flood in Genesis is merely a version of one of the oldest pieces of purely fict.i.tious literature extant; that whether this is or is not its origin, the events a.s.serted in it to have taken place a.s.suredly never did take place; further, that in point of fact the story in the plain and logically necessary sense of its words has long since been given up by orthodox and conservative commentators of the Established Church."

The only rational interpretation of the extraordinary stories of the Pentateuch and other scriptures is to regard them as mythical and allegorical, borrowed from the astrological systems of more ancient peoples. It is very difficult to present within the limits here allowed what has grown into ponderous volumes in elucidating the matter in hand.

The story of Jonah and the Fish, taken as a literal story, is incredible, though the notorious Brooklyn preacher thinks that it must be literally true, as that G.o.d might have so diluted the gastric juice in the stomach of the fish as to make Jonah quite indigestible! This whole story is found in earlier pagan writings, and is fully explained by the astronomical phenomena. The earth is a huge fish in the ancient mythology, and on December the 21st the sun (Jonah, the type) sinks into its dark belly, and after three days-to wit, December 25th-it comes forth. The Sun-G.o.d is on dry land again.

There is a Hindoo fable much like this. In Grecian fable Hercules was swallowed by a whale at Joppa, and is said to have lain three days in his entrails. The Sun was called _Jona_, as can be shown from many authorities. The nursery-tale of "Little Red Riding-Hood" was also a sun-myth, mutilated in the English story, showing how the _Sun_ was devoured by the _Black Wolf_ (Night), and came out unhurt. Scores of similar sun-myths could be narrated.

But there are geographical inaccuracies which show its mythical character. Instead of Nineveh being "three days' journey" from the coast where Jonah was vomited out, it is distant some four hundred miles of hill and plain, and the size of the city was not twenty by twelve miles, but more nearly eight by three miles. Moreover, the city showed no signs of decay till about two hundred and fifty years after the alleged warning of Jonah. It is truly astounding that intelligent men can be so blind. It was recently admitted by high Christian authority that there is not a particle of proof for this story except that Jesus had referred to Jonah as being "three days and nights in the whale's belly." If Jesus did say this, he used it as an ill.u.s.tration. He probably stated a current tradition, if he said it at all.

Let us now try our key in the closet-door of the Samson story.

According to the Bible account, Samson performed twelve princ.i.p.al exploits; and if you will turn to any good dictionary of mythology you will find a wonderful likeness to the twelve labors of Hercules in the Greek myth of the Sun. Time can be taken to examine only one-the cutting off of Samson's hair while reposing in the lap of Delilah, and the consequent loss of his strength. Professor Goldhizer says: "Long locks of hair and a long beard are mythological attributes of the sun."...

"When the powerful summer's sun is succeeded by the weak rays of the winter's sun, its strength departs." But as the sun becomes ascendant again he renews his strength, just as Samson's strength returned when his hair grew out again. The seven locks represent the seven planetary worlds. The constellation Virgo represents Samson's wife; and Delilah, in whose lap he dallied and lost his strength, represents the months of autumn, before the winter came to hand him over to the Philistines, the dreary time of the winter months. The story of Samson is found in the sun-myths of all the Sun-wors.h.i.+p-ping nations, and the story of Hercules was known in an island colony of the Phnicians five hundred years before it was known in Greece; and the story is almost as old as humanity itself. The very name Samson (or Samp-shon) in some languages means the sun; and there is not an exploit recorded of him that does not yield to the solar interpretation; and when modern ministers undertake to explain how Samson caught three hundred foxes and set fire to their tails, they never think to mention (if they happen to know it) that in the ancient festival of Ceres a fox-hunt was enacted in the theatres of Rome in which burning torches were bound to the foxes' tails. We have an explanation of this from Prof. Steinthal: "This was a symbolical reminder of the damage done to the fields by mildew, called the 'red fox' in the last of April. It was at the time of the _Dog Star_ at which the mildew was most to be feared; and if at that time great solar heat followed too close upon the h.o.a.r-frost or dew of the cold nights, the mischief raged like a burning fox through the corn-fields. Like the lion, the fox is an animal that indicates the solar heat, being well suited both by its color and long-haired tail." Bou-chart gives a similar explanation and application, and so do many other writers. It remains for ministers of this nineteenth century to dole out the ancient fables of the past as literal history to the grown-up children of to-day. The story of Samson in all its details yields to the key of ancient symbolism. Why not admit the fact that this is a solar myth, and thus get clear of all the blasphemy and absurdities of a literal interpretation?

The incredibly absurd story of Joshua's commanding the sun to stand still for several hours has a rational explanation, regarded as a myth, well known to initiates to set forth the correction of the calendar, so as to make different periods correspondras one stops a clock to make it agree with the ringing of the standard time by the town bell. There are scores of parallels in ancient history.

Regard Solomon as a sun-myth, and you have no difficulty about the size of his family. The seven hundred wives and the three hundred concubines represented so many stars. Even the narratives of David's exploits with the five kings, his "unpleasantness" with Saul, and his dalliance and intrigue with Bathsheba yield to the astro-mythological key.

The same is true of the story of the two she-bears that ate up the forty-two children who called shorn Elisha "bald-head." The prophet was the Sun, denuded of his curls at a certain astronomical period; the two bears were the constellations _Ursa Major and Ursa Minor_, the great bear and the little bear; and the forty-two children were a group of stars covered by the two bears, so that, figuratively, it might be said they were "eaten up." And yet the late Dr. Nehemiah Adams of Boston once exclaimed: "I believe that the forty-two children who made fun of the bald head of the prophet of G.o.d are now in h.e.l.l." He once wrote an admirable book ent.i.tled _Agnes; or, The Little Key,_ but he failed to find the skeleton key to unlock the solar fable of the prophet, the saucy little children, and the voracious bears.

Within the last few months Philadelphia has been the scene of a most imposing ecclesiastical ceremony-the invest.i.ture of the Roman Catholic archbishop with the pallium, a narrow band or sash made from wool grown upon white lambs that had been blessed by the Pope on St. Agnes' Day. We heard the eloquent sermon of the archbishop of New York, and he commenced his plausible discourse by tracing the pallium to the mantle that fell from Elijah upon Elisha, the summer and winter sun, and was worn by him after the translation of Elijah. But we try our skeleton key, and find that Elijah represented the ascending summer sun, and Elisha the sun of autumn; and when Elijah gained the greatest height, of course his lessened rays, well called a "mantle," fell upon the bald-headed man representing the autumn. This is the whole story in plain language, and this is the kind of stuff that ecclesiastical man-millinery is made of. The crowd stared with admiration and wonder, just as children are amused with their doll-babies, who are "sick" or "well," "naughty" or "good," according to the whims of the "little women" who dress and nurse them. There is a doll-baby period in every child's history, and it may be necessary to have a doll-baby period in religion; but it does seem to some of us that it is about time for full-grown women and men to doff their bibs and ap.r.o.ns, lay aside their doll-babies and other ecclesiastical toys, and act as becomes men and women of full growth. Even Paul said, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." It has been well said by a judicious writer: "Intelligent readers, except revelationists, well know that the Hebrew fables are myths which teem with history of a kind, if we can only separate the wheat from the chaff. So also is the story of the Creation in Genesis. We have a very valuable myth, though a purely phallic tale, such as East Indians-and perhaps they only-can thoroughly comprehend.

"We would not seek to detract from the great value of myths, for, besides their own intrinsic worth, these stories also exhibit to us many phases of ancient life and thought. Myths may be regarded as history which we have not yet been able to read. We should not discard as untrue or unhistorical any tale, biblical or other, as implying that it is false and unworthy of consideration. On the contrary, we cannot too earnestly and patiently ponder over every ancient tale, legend, or myth, as they all have some foundation and instructive lesson. Whenever an important myth has existed an important fact has doubtless been its basis."

CHAPTER VII. THE FABLE OF THE FALL

_"And calleth those things which be not as though they were."-Rom.

4:17._

THE prevailing belief of Christendom to-day is, that about six thousand years ago, somewhere in Asia, the Supreme Creator took common clay and moulded it into the form of a man, somewhat as a sculptor forms the model from which the marble statue is to be constructed, and when shaped to his liking he breathed into the clay model the breath of life, and it became a living soul. This miraculous work is believed to have been begun and completed on a particular day; so that in the morning the earth contained not a man, but in the afternoon the full-grown, bearded man stood up in his majesty and a.s.sumed supremacy over all living things. This G.o.dlike man finding himself lonely, the Creator put him to sleep, and opened his side and took therefrom a rib, out of which he formed a woman, who was to be a companion, a wife, to the man; and from this particular couple have come, by ordinary generation, all the people dwelling upon the face of the earth. They are said to have been perfect, but, unfortunately for their progeny, this perfection did not long continue. Before they were blest with offspring they lost their Creator's favor by eating fruit from a forbidden tree, and became fearfully demoralized, and, instead of begetting children endowed with their own angelic qualities, they became the unhappy parents of a race of moral monsters, of which we are all degraded and degenerate descendants.

The sacerdotal story of the fall of Adam and Eve is based upon the a.s.sumption that it is to be received as literal history, revealed by the Creator and written down in a book by a man specially chosen and plenarily inspired; so that there can be no error or mistake in the record. To question this narrative in its literal sense is most impious, and subjects the doubter to the charge of favoring infidelity.

While persons "professing and calling themselves Christians" cannot agree regarding many things deemed by them matters of vital importance, the fall of man is a matter in which they are fully agreed. The great basic dogma which underlies all modern systems of theology, Romish and Protestant, is the utter depravity of the human race through the fall of Adam, dooming a large majority of the human family to eternal punishment.

How evil came into the world has been the most perplexing problem of the ages. Before it the most gigantic minds have been covered with confusion and paralyzed with doubt. Why sin and suffering should have been permitted, not to say created, has never been made clear to the human reason by any system of theology, Romish or Protestant. A few years ago Dr. Edward Beecher published a book ent.i.tled _The Conflict of Ages_.

When reviewed by Dr. Charles Hodge in the _Princeton Review_ he ent.i.tled his paper "Beecher's Conflict;" but it was rightly called _The Conflict of Ages_; it was not "Beecher's Conflict," and the explanation given by theology only involves the question in greater doubt and difficulty.

From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated: Did not G.o.d know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why, then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam's sin be imputed to his children?

The circ.u.mstances connected with the degradation of man are so extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote period of the world's childhood. For the support of the dogma of total depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his teachings are to be credited. n.o.body pretends that Moses, the doubtful author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is claimed that he wrote under inspiration of G.o.d, though there is not a single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired, or that G.o.d had anything more to do with his writings than he had with the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the a.s.sumption that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to Moses-at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the Christian era-is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have been born or the writing called Genesis existed.

It is not within the lines of our general purpose to here give in detail the numerous legends-substantially the same, though differing in particulars-regarding the introduction of sin into this world, found in the writings of Hindoos, Persians, Etruscans, Phnicians, Babylonians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Thibetans, and others. Any man who would now dare to deny this statement regarding the prevalence of the story of the fall centuries before the writing of Genesis existed would justly subject himself to the charge of ignorance or dishonesty.

Dr. Inman states that Adam is the Phallus and Eve the Yoni-in other words, that Adam and Eve signify the same idea as Abraham and Sara, Jacob and Leah, man and woman; thus embodying in the Hebrew the Hindoo notion that all things sprang from Mahadeva and his Sacti, my lady Sara.

This deduction enables us at once to recognize, as did the early Christians, the mythical character of the account of the fall; and we must conclude that the story means that the male and female lived happily together so long as each was without pa.s.sion for the other, but that when a union took place between them the woman suffered all the miseries inseparable from pregnancy, and the man had to toil for a family, whereas he had previously only thought of himself. The serpent is the emblem of "desire," indicated by the man and recognized by the woman. "There is a striking resemblance between the Hindoo and Hebrew myths. The first tells us that Mahadeva was the primary Being, and from him arose the 'Sacti.' The second makes Adam the original, and Eve the product of his right side-an idea which is readily recognizable in the word _Benjamin_. After the creation, the Egyptian, Vedic, and Jewish stories all place the woman beside a citron or pomegranate tree, or one bearing both fruits; near this is a cobra or asp, the emblem of male desire, because these serpents can inflate or erect themselves at will."

General Forlong thus discourses upon this subject: "Most cosmogonies relate a phallic tale of two individuals Adam and Eve, meeting in a garden of delight (Gan-Eden), and then being seduced by a serpent Ar (Ar-i-man), Hoa, Op, or Orus, to perform the generative act, which it is taught led to sin and trouble, and this long before we hear of a spiritual G.o.d or of solar deities. These cosmogonies narrate a contest between man and Nature, in which the former fell, and must ever fall, for the laws of Sol and his seasons none can resist."... "The Jews learned most of their faith and fables from the great peoples of the East; especially did they get the two cosmogonies, and that solar fable, mixed with truth, of a serpent tempting a woman with the fruit of a tree, of course in the fading or autumnal equinox, when only fruit exists and all creation tries to save itself by s.h.i.+elding all the stores of nature from the fierce onslaughts of angry Typhon when entering on his dreary winter. The Gan-Eden fable was clearly an attempt by Zoroastrians to explain to outsiders the difficult philosophical problem of the origin of man and of good and evil. Mithras, they said-and the Jews followed suit-is the good G.o.d, the incarnation of G.o.d, who dwells in the beauteous...o...b..of day; to which Christian Jews added that he was born of a virgin in a cave which he illuminated."

"The tree of life mentioned in Gen. 3: 22 certainly appears," says Mr.

Smith (Chal. Acct, p. 88), "to correspond to the sacred grove of Anu, which a later fragment of the creation-tablets states was guarded by a sword turning to all the four points of the compa.s.s; and there too we have allusions to a thirst for knowledge, having been the cause of man's fall; the G.o.ds curse the dragon and Adam for the transgression. This Adam was one of the Zalmat-qaqadi, or dark men, created by Hea or Nin-Si-ku, a name pointing to Hea being a Nin or Creator, while Adam is called Adami or Admi, the present Eastern term for man and the lingam, and no proper name." The impression that I get from the legends of Izdubar, or the Flood, or even the creation-tablets, is simply that these were religious revivals. Nearly every ill.u.s.tration of Mr. Smith's last volume shows the serpent as an evil influence. Now, if I am right-and all I have read elsewhere tends to the same conclusion-then all the tales as to a temptation by a serpent, a fall, are phallo-pythic trans.m.u.tations of faith, and have no more connection with the first creation of man upon earth than have the flood, the ark, or mountain-wors.h.i.+p of Jews in the desert, or the destruction of Pytho by Apollo in the early days of Delphi, etc.

"The tree and serpent," says Fergusson, "are symbolized in every religious system which the world has known, not excepting the Hebrew and Christian, The two together are typical of the reproductive powers of vegetable and animal life. It is uncertain whether the Jewish tree of life was borrowed from the Egyptians or Chaldeans; but the meaning was in both cases the same, and we know that the a.s.syrian tree was a life-giving divinity. And Moses, or the writer of Genesis, has represented very much the same in his coiled serpent and love-apples, or citrons, of the tree of life.

"The writer of Genesis probably drew his idea of the two trees, that of life and that of knowledge, from Egyptian and Zoroastrian story; for criticism now a.s.signs a comparatively late date to the writing of the first Pentateuchal book. After Genesis no further notice is taken in the Bible of the tree of knowledge. But that of life, or the tree which gives life, seems several times alluded to, especially in Rev. 2: 7. The lingam or pillar is the Eastern name for the tree which gives life. But when this tree became covered with the inscriptions of all the past ages, as in Egypt, then Toth, the Pillar, came to be called the tree of knowledge."

But it must not be supposed that all Christian theologians of the present day hold the historical and literal truth of the legend of the fall of Adam. In several of the public libraries of Philadelphia may be found a book ent.i.tled _Beginnings of History_, written by a learned professor of Archaeology at the National Library of France-Professor Francois Lenormant. It was republished by Scribner, New York, in 1886, with an introduction by Francis Brown, a.s.sociate professor of Biblical Philology in the Presbyterian Union Theological Seminary of New York. It is written from a Christian standpoint, and the writer is a firm defender of the infallibility of the Hebrew Scriptures, and can never be suspected of having any sympathy with modern rationalism. He not only admits that the Edenic story of the introduction of sin, found in Genesis, is a compilation made up from the Shemitic traditions of Babylonians, Phnicians, and other pagan peoples, but he has covered page after page with proofs of this fact by learned and accurate quotations from their numerous legends. He puts in the common plea of lawyers, known as _confession and avoidance_, and takes the ground that "the writer of the Hebrew Genesis took these fables from floating tradition as he found them, and cleansed them of their impurities, altered their polytheistic tendencies, made them monotheistic, and otherwise so transformed them as to make them fit vehicles of spiritual instruction by the Divine Spirit which inspired him."

This is an ingenious device, but it will hardly satisfy sound thinkers.

The question is, whether the story of Adam is historical truth or pagan fiction. The highest scholars.h.i.+p p.r.o.nounces it fiction, while certain orthodox writers admit the fact "that G.o.d used prevailing but unreal fancies to teach important truths."