rt that it has played in the
life of Christendom, I need not now speak. My present concern is to
show how the philosophy of Israel--accepted nominally for Christ's
sake, but really for its own--has influenced the educational policy
of the West.

In the Old Testament the Western mind found itself face to face with
the philosophical theories--theories about the world and its origin,
about Man and his destiny, about conduct and its consequences--to
which its own mythologies had given inadequate expression, but which
the poetical genius of a practical people was able to formulate to
the satisfaction of a practical world. In the philosophy of Israel
"Nature" was conceived of, not as animated by an indwelling life or
soul, but as the handiwork of an omnipotent God. In six days--so runs
the story--"God created the heavens and the earth." Whether by the
word which we translate as "days" were meant terrestrial days or
cosmic ages matters nothing, for in either case the broad fact
remains that according to the Biblical narrative the work of creation
occupied a definite period of time, and that on a certain day in the
remote past the Creator rested from his labours, surveyed his
handiwork, and pronounced it to be very good.

His next step was to stand aside from the world that he had made,
leave it to its own devices and see how it would behave itself in the
person of its lord and his viceroy,--Man. That the Creator should
place Creation on its trial and that it should speedily misbehave
itself, may be said to have been preordained. The idea of a Creator
postulates the further idea of a Fall. The finished work of an
omnipotent Creator is presumably good,--good in this sense, if in
no other, that its actualities must needs determine the creature's
ideals and standards of good. But the world, as Man knows it, seems
to be deeply tainted with evil. How is this anomaly to be accounted
for? The story of the Fall is the answer to this question. Whether
modern theology regards the story of the Fall as literally or only as
symbolically true, I cannot say for certain. The question is of minor
importance. What is of supreme importance is that Christian theology
accepts and has always accepted the consequences of the _idea_ of the
Fall, and that in formulating those consequences it has provided the
popular thought of the West with conceptions by which its whole
outlook on life has been, and is still, determined and controlled.

The idea o