to be none at all, or else obscure and remote from our understanding;
some of them, indeed, term it an intelligible Paradise, but confined
to no one particular place; whilst others, at the same time make it a
sensible one, and here it is they first divided about it, etc.... Now,
the history of Paradise, according to Moses, is this:--When God had, in
six days, finished the creation of the world, the seventh day he rested
from all manner of work. And here Moses relates particularly each day's
operations: but for the story of mankind, as well male as female, of
which he makes a particular treatise by himself. Wherefore, omitting the
rest at present, let us consider the Mosaic doctrine upon those three
subjects, viz., Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden, together with those
things which are interwoven within them. As to the first man, Adam,
Moses says he was formed not out of stones or dragon's teeth, as other
Cosmists have feigned concerning their men, but out of the dust or
clay of the earth, and when his body was formed, 'God _blew into his
nostrils_ the breath of life, and man was made a living soul.'

"But after another manner, and of another matter, was the woman
built--viz., with one of Adam's small bones, for as Adam lay asleep, God
took away one of his _ribs_, and out of that made Eve. So much for
the forming of the first man and woman by the literal text. Moses has
likewise given us a large account of their first habitation. He says
that God made them in a certain famous garden in the East, and gave it
to them as a farm to cultivate and to inhabit, which garden was a most
delightful place, watered with four several fountains or rivers, planted
with trees of every kind.... Amongst the trees, in the midst of the
garden, stood two more remarkable than the rest; one was called the tree
of life, the other the tree of death, or of the knowledge of good and
evil.... God, upon pain of death, prohibits Adam and Eve from tasting
the fruit of this tree; but it happened that Eve sitting solitary under
this tree, without her husband, there came to her a serpent or adder,
which (though I know not by what means or power) civilly accosted the
woman (if we may judge of the thing by the event) in these words, or to
this purpose:-- *

* We extract this portion not for its merits of buffoonery,
but to show the real state of mind which could actuate a
dignitary of the Church of England in writing it, as the
eighth c