The Fathers and the Christian sects named above, did not take the first three chapters of Genesis literally, because it would imply absurdity and blasphemy. The idea of God, namely, of the supreme and eternal cause, who clothes our clay for the pleasure of walking in a garden; the idea of a woman conversing with a serpent; listening to its counsels and heeding them; that of a man and a woman organized for reproduction, and yet destined to be immortal on earth, and to procreate a mathematical infinity of beings, immortal like themselves, who also will infinitely multiply, and will all find their food in the fruits of the trees of a garden where they will all dwell; a fruit culled that is to kill Adam and Eve, and to be transmitted as a hereditary crime to all their descendants, who did not participate to their disobedience, crime which will be forgiven only in as much as men will commit another crime, infinitely greater, a deicide--if such a crime might exist; the woman who since that time is condemned to bring forth with pain, as if the pains of childbirth were not natural to her organization, and were not common to her, as well as to the other animals which have not tasted the forbidden fruit; the serpent forced to crawl, as if a footless reptile could move any other way: so many absurdities and follies, heaped in those first three chapters, they could not believe and ascribe them to God. Maimonide, one of the most learned Rabbins of the Jews, thus wrote in the twelfth century: "We ought not to understand literally what is written in the books of the creation; nor entertain about the creation the opinions generally agreed. It is for this reason that our wise men urged upon us to keep their true teaching secret, and not to lift up the veil of allegory which conceals the truths they contain. If taken literally the relation of the creation gives us the most absurd and extravagant ideas of the Deity. Whoever will find out their true teaching, ought to keep it to himself; this is the earnest recommendation of our wise men, and more especially in regard to the first six days. Those who know ought to speak about it but obscurely, as I do myself, so as to let their hearers guess if they can." The above facts and proofs lead us to the conclusion that the Church of Rome borrowed the dogma of original sin from the Pagans. As the Protestants, who call themselves Orthodox, borrowed it in the sixteenth century from the Church of Rome, it follows that they also hold it from the Pagans. _Therefore, the doctrine of Original Sin is of Pagan origin._ CHAPTER V. PAGAN ORIGIN OF THE DOCTRINE OF TRINITY. THE Roman Catholic writers themselves confess that the Pagans believed in Trinity; also the most of the self-called Protestant Orthodox historians and authors. The neutral authors are unanimous on this point. The following facts and proofs we shall impartially extract from those three classes of writers: