He takes men--and he could not but take men as he
sees them--with their sinful nature, with their moral and spiritual
capacity, with their relations of sex, with their relations of family.
He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the
subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the
original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and
distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot
be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the
Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that
crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so
many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church
downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained
in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such
as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such
as he is before the narrative begins.
It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's
nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was
effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of
evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became
a man.
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