contain in itself the demand that also the form in which
the facts of truth in Genesis III are given to us, has historical reality.
He who makes this demand has only his own short-sightedness and imprudence
to blame, if he also loses the substance with the form, the figurative
nature of which can be shown to him only too certainly. We acknowledge it
as a real providence of God, which intends faithfully to guard believing
man against a senseless and slavish adherence to the letter, and against
grounding his means of salvation upon insecure foundations, that at the
grand and venerable portal of Holy Scripture two accounts stand peacefully
beside one another, which, if we penetrate through the form into their
substance, complete one another in magnificent and profound harmony, but
which, if we look upon the form as their substance, so diametrically
contradict each other that we cannot do anything else but reject the one or
the other, or, still more logically, both. We think that this hint is
strong enough to be understood, and bears, like all bowing before truth and
its power of conviction, rich fruit not only for our knowledge, but also
for the purity, certainty, and richness of our religiousness. We shall not
lose by this acknowledgment the character of revelation and the impression
of the truth of these Biblical records, but shall be able through them, and
through them alone, to gain and perceive it. It is true, the first account,
and still more the second--the account of the creation and of the primitive
history of man--has in its external form an exceedingly close relationship
to the poetical myths of the ancient nations of the Orient; but {323} its
difference does not consist essentially in the form--although this too,
being the form of a true and correct substance, shows differences enough
from these heathen myths--but consists in the substance itself. These
heathen myths certainly contain many beautiful, deep, and true factors, but
always, besides, fundamental ideas which we have to reject as half-true or
wholly erroneous: sometimes a dualistic conception of God and the world,
sometimes a materialization of the divine, the spiritual, and the ethical,
sometimes fatalistic and sometimes magic elements in great number. These
Biblical representations, on the other hand, certainly appear to us still
in a picturesque form which is analogous to that formation of myth; for it
really seems to be the only form in which the mind