ty with its doctrine of the holy love of God and its
adoring faith in Jesus. But both Judaism and Hellenism had already the
tendency to look back toward a better and happier time and to think of
the present as a fall from it. Paul felt this like everyone else, and
forthwith took some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his
system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took the Genesis story
literally or not, and he certainly made Adam the type of the unideal or
earthly man who had become estranged from God. He was too great a man
to be pinned down to mere literalism in a question of this kind, so in
his use of the terms supplied by the rabbinical version of the legend
he glides easily into the statement of the obvious truth that the Adam,
or lower man, or earthly principle in every human being, needs to be
transformed by the uprising of the Christ or ideal man, within the
soul. "For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made
alive." "The first man is of the earth earthy: the second man is the
Lord from heaven."

Here, then, we have the origins of the doctrine of the Fall. Right
through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world
as the ruins of a divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will.
It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening
influence upon hopeful endeavour for the good of the race. It is not
integral to Christianity, for Jesus never said a word about it and did
not even allude to it indirectly. It implies a view of the nature and
dealings of God with men which is unethical and untrue. Surely, if God
knew beforehand that the world would go wrong, the blame for
catastrophe was not all man's. If He were so baffled and
horror-stricken by the results as the dogmatic theologian makes out, He
ought to have been more careful about the way He did His work at the
beginning; a world which went wrong so early and so easily was anything
but "very good," although He pronounced it to be so according to the
Genesis writer. Besides, why should a trivial act of transgression
have sent it all wrong? We take leave of our common sense when we talk

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree.

To be sure Milton did not believe it himself when he wrote that line,
but his Puritan associates and Catholic ancestors did, and orthodoxy
professes to do so still, though it does not know quite how to put it
without falling into absu