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, with their relations of family. He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such as he is before the narrative begins. It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became a man. But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and inclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but at any rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point in the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have been first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of God,--this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the Bible tells nor w
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