If resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the posse non peccare would have become the non posse peccare.

Thomasius: "That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is Satan's doctrine and philosophy." The tree was mainly a tree of probation, It is right for a father to make his son's title to his estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as Thaddeus Stevens made his son's possession of property conditional upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not know.

(c) Opportunity of securing physical immortality. The body of the first man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:45). Science shows that physical life involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking this decay and preserving the body's youth. This means was the "tree of life" (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In other words, the posse non mori might have become a non posse mori.

The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man's dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it by God's righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally created to attain : 1 Cor. 15: 45 - "The first man Adam became a living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit"; Rev. 22: 14-"Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life."

The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man's original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man's prehistoric condition point to a development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most civilized.

For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: “The primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism"; but especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian, and the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears, with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing. J. S. Stuart-Glennie, Contemp. Rev., Dec. 1892: 844, defines civilization as "enforced social organization, with written records, and hence intellectual development and social progress."

With regard to this view we remark:

(a) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.- History shows a law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation whose history runs back of the Christian era as for example, the Romans,

the Greeks, the Egyptians - the subsequent progress has been downward, and no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result of influence from without.

Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample of man's first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching, for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1: 48, presents a far more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with degeneration "as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the development of civilization." So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of Nature: "Civilization and savagery are both the results of evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason, neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as the primitive condition of man." Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1: 467 — “As plausible an argument might be constructed out of the deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved upward from one."

Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration. The same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks. Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savagetheory the tests of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer as saying: "Probably most of them [ savages ], if not all of them, had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during those higher states. . . . It is quite possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression." Spencer, however, denies that savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.

Bib. Sac., 6:715; 29: 282-"Man as a moral being does not tend to rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be elevated and sustained by some force from without and above himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are apparently never developed from within." Had savagery been man's primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately, Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Seelye, Introd, to A Century of Dishonor, 3-"The first missionaries to the Indians in Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to till their fields, to provide them with comfortable homes, clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams, skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power genuinely Christian." So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol. 14: 408-412.

Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ, 149-168, shows that evolution does not necessarily involve development as regards particular races. There is degeneration in all the organic orders. As regards man, he may be evolving in some directions, while in others he has degenerated. Lidgett, Spir. Principle of the Atonement, 245, speaks of "Prof. Clifford as pointing to the history of human progress and declaring that mankind is a risen and not a fallen race. There is no real contradiction between these two views. God has not let man go because man has rebelled against him. Where sin abounded, grace did much more abound." The humanity which was created in Christ and which is upheld by his power has ever received reinforcements of its physical and mental life, in spite of its moral and spiritual deterioration. "Some shrimps, by the adjustment of their bodily parts, go onward to the higher structure of the lobsters and crabs; while others, taking up the habit of dwelling in the gills of fishes, sink downward into a state closely resembling that of the worms." Drummond, Ascent of Man: "When a boy's kite comes down in our garden, we do not hold that it originally came from the clouds. So nations went up, before they came down. There is a national gravitation. The stick age preceded the stone age, but has been lost." Tennyson: "Evolution ever climbing after some ideal good, And Reversion ever dragging Evolution in the mud." Evolution often becomes devolution, if not

devilution. A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 104-"The Jordan is the fitting symbol of our natural life, rising in a lofty elevation, and from pure springs, but plunging steadily down till it pours itself into that Dead Sea from which there is no outlet."

(b) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.

On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see Arthur Mitchell, Past in the Present, 219: Rude art is often the debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest art in a nation may coexist with the highest; cave-life may accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland, where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart, referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually. Rawlinson: "The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread tradition makes the cradle of the human race." The Tyrolese peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274. Mason, Origins of Invention, 110, 124, 128-"There is no evidence that a stone age ever existed in some regions. In Africa, Canada, and perhaps Michigan, the metal age was as old as the stone age." An illustration of the mathematical powers of the savage is given by Rev. A. E. Hunt in an account of the native arithmetic of Murray Islands, Torres Straits. "Netat" (one) and "neis" (two) are the only numerals, higher numbers being described by combinations of these, as "neis-netat" for three, "neis-ineis" for four, etc., or by reference to one of the fingers, elbows or other parts of the body. A total of thirty-one could be counted by the latter method. Beyond this all numbers were "many," as this was the limit reached in counting before the introduction of English numerals, now in general use in the islands.

....

Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, 171-"It is commonly supposed that the direction of the movement [in the variation of species] is ever upward. The fact is on the contrary that in a large number of cases, perhaps in the aggregate in more than half, the change gives rise to a form which, by all the canons by which we determine relative rank, is to be regarded as regressive or degradational. . . . . Species, genera, families, and orders have all, like the individuals of which they are composed, a period of decay in which the gain won by infinite toil and pains is altogether lost in the old age of the group." Shaler goes on to say that in the matter of variation successes are to failures as 1 to 100,000, and if man be counted the solitary distinguished success, then the proportion is something like 1 to 100,000,000. No species that passes away is ever reinstated. If man were now to disappear, there is no reason to believe that by any process of change a similar creature would be evolved, however long the animal kingdom continued to exist. The use of these successive chances to produce man is inexplicable except upon the hypothesis of an infinite designing Wisdom.

(c) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev. Sept., 1882: 194-"There is no cruel treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find the most of this cruel treatment among savages." Tylor instances "street Arabs." He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but

savage tribes to a builder's yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223: McLennan, Studies in Ancient History. Gulick, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892: 517-"Cannibalism and infanticide are unknown among the anthropoid apes. These must be the results of degradation. Pirates and slavetraders are not men of low and abortive intelligence, but men of education who deliberately throw off all restraint, and who use their powers for the destruction of society."

Keane, Man, Past and Present, 40, quotes Sir H. H. Johnston, an administrator who has had a wider experience of the natives of Africa than any man living, as saying that "the tendency of the negro for several centuries past has been an actual retrograde one-return toward the savage and even the brute. If he had been cut off from the immigration of the Arab and the European, the purely Negroid races, left to themselves, so far from advancing towards a higher type of humanity, might have actually reverted by degrees to a type no longer human." Ratzel's History of Mankind: "We assign no great antiquity to Polynesian civilization. In New Zealand it is a matter of only some centuries back. In newly occupied territories, the development of the population began upon a higher level and then fell off. The Maoris' decadence resulted in the rapid impoverishment of culture, and the character of the people became more savage and cruel. Captain Cook found objects of art worshiped by the descendants of those who produced them.”

Recent researches have entirely discredited L. H. Morgan's theory of an original brutal promiscuity of the human race. Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 6, note-"The theory of an original promiscuity is rendered extremely doubtful by the habits of many of the higher animals." E. B. Tylor, in 19th Century, July, 1906—“A sort of family life, lasting for the sake of the young, beyond a single pairing season, exists among the higher manlike apes. The male gorilla keeps watch and ward over his progeny. He is the antetype of the house-father. The matriarchal system is a later device for political reasons, to bind together in peace and alliance tribes that would otherwise be hostile. But it is an artificial system introduced as a substitute for and in opposition to the natural paternal system. When the social pressure is removed, the maternalized husband emancipates himself, and paternalism begins." Westermarck, History of Human Marriage: "Marriage and the family are thus intimately connected with one another; it is for the benefit of the young that male and female continue to live together. Marriage is therefore rooted in the family, rather than the family in marriage. . . . . There is not a shred of genuine evidence for the notion that promiscuity ever formed a general stage in the social history of mankind. The hypothesis of promiscuity, instead of belonging to the class of hypotheses which are scientifically permissible, has no real foundation, and is essentially unscientific." Howard, History of Matrimonial Institutions: "Marriage or pairing between one man and one woman, though the union be often transitory and the rule often violated, is the typical form of sexual union from the infancy of the human race."

(d) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.

For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 115; Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:205–“In Hesiod we have the legend of a golden age under the lordship of Chronos, when man was free from cares and toils, in untroubled youth and cheerfulness, with a superabundance of the gifts which the earth furnished of itself; the race was indeed not immortal, but it experienced death even as a soft sleep." We may add that capacity for religious truth depends upon moral conditions. Very early races therefore have a purer faith than the later ones. Increasing depravity makes it harder for the later generations to exercise faith. The wisdom-literature may have been very early instead of very late, just as monotheistic ideas are clearer the further we go back. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 171-“Precisely because such tribes [ Australian and African savages] have been deficient in average moral quality, have they failed to march upward on the road of civilization with the rest of mankind, and have fallen into these bog holes of savage degradation." On petrified civilizations, see Henry George, Progress and Poverty, 433-439-"The law of human progress, what is it but the moral law?" On retrogressive development in nature, see Weismann, Heredity, 2:1-30. But see also Mary E. Case, "Did the Romans Degenerate?" in Internat. Journ. Ethics, Jan. 1893: 165–182, in which it is maintained that the Romans made constant advances rather. Henry Sumner Maine calls the Bible

the most important single document in the history of sociology, because it exhibits authentically the early development of society from the family, through the tribe, into the nation,—a progress learned only by glimpses, intervals, and survivals of old usages in the literature of other nations.

2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism, this first theological stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.

This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy, English transl., 25, 26, 515-636-"Each branch of our knowledge passes successively through three different theoretical conditions: the Theological, or fictitious; the Metaphysical, or abstract; and the Scientific, or positive. . . . . The first is the necessary point of departure of the human understanding; and the third is its fixed and definite state. The second is merely a state of transition. In the theological state, the human mind, seeking the essential nature of beings, the first and final causes, the origin and purpose, of all effects — in short, absolute knowledge—supposes all phenomena to be produced by the immediate action of supernatural beings. In the metaphysical state, which is only a modification of the first, the mind supposes, instead of supernatural beings, abstract forces, veritable entities, that is, personified abstractions, inherent in all beings, and capable of producing all phenomena. What is called the explanation of phenomena is, in this stage, a mere reference of each to its proper entity. In the final, the positive state, the mind has given over the vain search after absolute notions, the origin and destination of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and applies itself to the study of their lawsthat is, their invariable relations of succession and resemblance. . . . . The theological system arrived at its highest perfection when it substituted the providential action of a single Being for the varied operations of numerous divinities. In the last stage of the metaphysical system, men substituted one great entity, Nature, as the cause of all phenomena, instead of the multitude of entities at first supposed. In the same way the ultimate perfection of the positive system would be to represent all phenomena as particular aspects of a single general fact—such as Gravitation, for instance."

This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following facts:

(a) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.

The gradual deterioration of all religions, apart from special revelation and influence from God, is proof that the purely evolutionary theory is defective. The most natural supposition is that of a primitive revelation, which little by little receded from human memory. In Japan, Shinto was originally the worship of Heaven. The worship of the dead, the deification of the Mikado, etc., were a corruption and aftergrowth. The Mikado's ancestors, instead of coming from heaven, came from Korea. Shinto was originally a form of monotheism. Not one of the first emperors was deified after death. Apotheosis of the Mikados dated from the corruption of Shinto through the importation of Buddhism. Andrew Lang, in his Making of Religion, advocates primitive monotheism. T. G. Pinches, of the British Museum, 1894, declares that, as in the earliest Egyptian, so in the early Babylonian records, there is evidence of a primitive monotheism. Nevins, Demon-Possession, 170-173, quotes W. A. P. Martin, President of the Peking University, as follows: "China, India, Egypt and Greece all agree in the monotheistic type of their early religion. The Orphic Hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities, celebrated the Pantheos, the universal God. The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Ruler. The Vedas speak of 'one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful, the Creator, Preserver and Destroyer of the Universe.' And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship."

On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips, 1:337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch