her form nor sound.
Thou, O Spiritual Sovereign, didst divide the grosser parts from the
purer. Thou madest heaven: Thou madest earth: Thou madest man."

There is a possibility that these conceptions may have come from
Christian sources instead of primitive Chinese traditions, possibly from
early Nestorian missionaries, though this is scarcely probable, as
Chinese emperors have been slow to introduce foreign conceptions into
their august temple service to Shangte; its chief glory lies in its
antiquity and its purely national character. Buddhism had already been
in China more than a thousand years, and these prayers are far enough
from its teachings. May we not believe that the ideas here expressed had
always existed in the minds of the more devout rulers of the empire? In
similar language, the Edda of the Icelandic Northmen describes the
primeval chaos.

Thus:

"'Twas the morning of time
When yet naught was,
Nor sand nor sea was there,
Nor cooling streams.
Earth was not formed
Nor heaven above.
A yawning gap was there
And grass nowhere."

Not unlike these conceptions of the "Beginning" is that which Morenhout
found in a song of the Tahitans, and which ran thus:

"He was; Toaroa was his name,
He existed in space; no earth, no heaven, no men."

M. Goussin adds the further translation: "Toaroa, the Great Orderer, is
the origin of the earth: he has no father, no posterity."[171] The
tradition of the Odshis, a negro tribe on the African Gold Coast,
represents the creation as having been completed in six days. God
created first the woman; then the man; then the animals; then the trees
and plants; and lastly the rocks. God created nothing on the seventh
day. He only gave men His commandments. The reversal of the order here
only confirms the supposition that it is an original tradition. We find
everywhere on the Western Hemisphere, north and south, plain recognition
of the creation of the world by one Supreme God, though the order is not
given. How shall we account for the similarities above indicated, except
on the supposition of a common and a very ancient source?

Still more striking are the various traditions of the Fall of man by
sin. In the British Museum there is a very old Babylonian seal which
bears the figures of a man and a woman stretching out their hands toward
a fruit-tree, while behind the woman lurks a serpent. A fragment bearing
an inscription represents a tree