17) is no cursing of the universe, or of the globe and its
creatures, but only a cursing of _the ground_; and of this not on its own
account, but only in its relation, as a means of subsistence, to man, and
in opposition to the {325} exemption from labor which his life hitherto
had, and to the agreeableness of his means of support in paradise.

After having thus rejected these two perversions of the Biblical doctrine,
there remains to us as an established substance of the latter, and as an
essential part of Christian dogmatics, so far as it may come into contact
with the _Darwinian_ views, at least the following: Man was originally
created by God, good and happy. To his goodness there also belonged the
possibility of having a sinless development, as he ought to have had; and
to his happiness there also belonged a life amid surroundings wholly
corresponding to him, and the possibility of obtaining exemption from death
and all evils by way of a self-controlling submission to God, which resists
temptation. We purposely express ourselves thus. For the Biblical primitive
history does not say that man was _created_ with exemption from the law of
death, but that the latter must have been _granted_ to him as a reward for
his submission: the tree of life stood _by the side of_ the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, and only the eating of the fruit of the tree of
life, by avoiding the eating of the forbidden fruit, should have given to
man that immortality which he forfeited by disobedience. Man became
disobedient, and, in consequence of it, subject to death; the harmony
between man and his surroundings disappeared; the earth became to him a
place of labor and of death; and now began for man his historical
development as a web of guilt, of punishment, and of education and
redeeming mercy.

Now, in the presence of this Biblical view, the question comes up first of
all: is a view according to which man should have been able and obliged to
take a sinless {326} development, and, in case he had taken it, should have
been exempt from the fate of death and of the ills preceding it, and
endowed with immortality as to body and soul--is such a view in any way
reconcilable with the Darwinian ideas of development, according to which
man came forth from the series of lower organisms, subject to death?

We could avoid answering this question by a deduction similar to that which
we drew in Chap. I, Sec. 3, when treating of the question of