all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said
that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one
on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with
everything that we know from physical science. Humanity might have grown
morally worse for millions of centuries, and the thing would in no way
have contradicted the principle of Evolution. Men of science (not being
raving lunatics) never said that there had been "an incessant rise in
the scale of being;" for an incessant rise would mean a rise without any
relapse or failure; and physical evolution is full of relapse and
failure. There were certainly some physical Falls; there may have been
any number of moral Falls. So that, as I have said, I am honestly
bewildered as to the meaning of such passages as this, in which the
advanced person writes that because geologists know nothing about the
Fall, therefore any doctrine of depravity is untrue. Because science has
not found something which obviously it could not find, therefore
something entirely different--the psychological sense of evil--is
untrue. You might sum up this writer's argument abruptly, but
accurately, in some way like this--"We have not dug up the bones of the
Archangel Gabriel, who presumably had none, therefore little boys, left
to themselves, will not be selfish." To me it is all wild and whirling;
as if a man said--"The plumber can find nothing wrong with our piano; so
I suppose that my wife does love me."

I am not going to enter here into the real doctrine of original sin, or
into that probably false version of it which the New Theology writer
calls the doctrine of depravity. But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it
had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man's primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the
vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as
the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Ed