them for the
first time a germ of spiritual consciousness, continuous with animal
intelligence, and yet distinct from it. From this pair or group
humanity has its origin. If they and their offspring had been true to
their spiritual capacities the animal nature would have been more
rapidly spiritualized in motives and tendencies.
Development--physical, moral, spiritual--would have been steady and
glorious. Whereas there was a fall at the very root of our humanity;
and the fall was repeated and reiterated and renewed, and the
development of our manhood was tainted and spoiled. There was a lapse
into approximately animal condition, which is dimly known to us as
primitive savagery. So that the condition of savage man is a parody of
what God intended man in his undeveloped stages to be, just as the
condition of civilized man in London and Paris is a parody of what God
intended developed man to come to. And there have been long and dreary
epochs when men have {231} seemed to lose almost all human ideals and
divine aspirations; when, in St. Paul's phrase, they were 'alive
without the law,' living a physical life unvisited by the remorse
consequent upon any knowledge of better things. And there have been,
on the other hand, epochs and special occasions of spiritual
opportunity and spiritual restorations. And so, on the whole, side by
side with the continually deteriorating effect of sin, has gone on the
slow process of redemption, the undoing of the evil of sin and the
realization of the divine purpose for man. Such an idea of human
history, partly only hypothetical, partly assured, conflicts with no
scientific ethnology, and is but a restatement of old-fashioned
Christianity in all that has religious importance.

V.--Of course, in all this I am assuming that the doctrine of sin and
of the Fall in its true importance has a much securer basis than the
supposition that Genesis iii is literal history. The doctrine of the
Fall is, as I have said, not separable from the doctrine of sin, or the
doctrine of sin from that of moral freedom. It rests upon the broad
basis of human experience, especially upon Christian experience, which
is bound up with its reality. Most of all it rests, for Christians, on
the teaching of Christ. For Christ's teaching and action postulate
throughout the doctrine of sin. But that doctrine in its turn goes
back upon the Old Testament, which is full of the truth that the evils
of human nature a