of inspired text. The omission was
one that only seers could remedy. It was presumably in these
circumstances that an agreement was imagined which, construed as a
condition of a covenant, assumed to have been made with Abraham, was
further assumed to have been renewed to Moses. The resulting poetry
was enveloped in a romance of which Continental scholarship has
discovered two versions, woven together, perhaps by Ezra, into a
single tale.

"In the beginning Elohim created the heaven and earth." That abrupt
declaration, presented originally in but one of the versions, had
already been pronounced of Indra and also of Ormuzd. The Hebraic
announcement alone prevailed. It emptied the firmament of its
monsters, dislodged the gods from the skies, and enthroned there a
deity at first multiple but subsequently unique. Afterward seraphs and
saints might replace the evaporated imaginings of other creeds; Satan
might create a world of his own and people it with the damned;
theology might evolve from elder faiths a newer trinity and set it
like a diadem in space; angels and archangels might refill the
devastated heavens of the past; none the less, in the light of that
austere pronouncement, for a moment Israel dwelled in contemplation of
the Ideal.

At the time it is probable that the story of the love of the sons of
Jahveh for the daughters of men, together with the pastel of Eden as
it stands to-day, were not contained in existing accounts of that
ideal. These legends, which regarded as legends are obviously false,
but which, construed as allegories, may be profoundly true, were
probably not diffused until after the captivity, when Israel was not
more subtle, that is not possible, but, by reason of her contact with
Persia, more wise.

The origin of evil these myths related but did not explain. Since
then, from no church has there come an adequate explanation of the
malediction under which man is supposed to labour because of the
natural propensities of beings that never were. That explanation these
myths, which orthodoxy has gravely, though sometimes reluctantly,
accepted, both provide and conceal. They date possibly from the
Ormuzdian revelation: "In the beginning was the living Word."

John, or more exactly his homonym, repeated the pronouncement, adding:
"The word was made flesh." But, save for a mention of the glory which
he had before the world was, he omitted to further follow the thought
of Ormuzd, who, in describing