again in vegetation? Tremendous heat. Where did the heat come from? If it was not caused by contact with a comet, _what was it_? And if it was not caused by contact with a comet, how do you explain the blazing sword at the gate of Eden; the fire falling from heaven on "the cities of the plain"; and the fire that fell on Job's sheep and camels and consumed them; and that drove Job to clamber by ropes down into the narrow-mouthed bottomless cave; where he tells us of the leviathan, the twisted, the undulating one, that cast down stones in the mire, and made the angels in heaven to tremble, and the deep to boil like a pot? And is it not more reasonable to suppose that this sublime religious poem, called the Book of Job, represents the exaltation of the human soul under the stress of the greatest calamity our race has ever endured, than to believe that it is simply a record of the sufferings of some obscure Arab chief from a loathsome disease? Surely inspiration should reach us through a different channel; and there should be some proportion between the grandeur of the thoughts and the dignity of the events which produced them. And if Origen is right, and it is absurd to suppose that the sun, moon, and stars were not created until the third day, then the sacred text is dislocated, transposed; and the second chapter narrates events which really occurred before those mentioned in the first chapter; and the "darkness" is something which came millions of years after that "Beginning," in which God made the earth, and the heavens, and all the host of them. In conclusion, let us observe how fully the Bible record accords with the statements of the Druidical, Hindoo, Scandinavian, and other legends, and with the great unwritten theory which underlies all our religion. Here we have: {p. 340} 1. The Golden Age; the Paradise. 2. The universal moral degeneracy of mankind; the age of crime and violence. 3. God's vengeance. 4. The serpent; the fire from heaven. 5. The cave-life and the darkness. 6. The cold; the struggle to live. 7. The "Fall of Man," from virtue to vice; from plenty to poverty; from civilization to barbarism; from the Tertiary to the Drift; from Eden to the gravel. 8. Reconstruction and regeneration. Can all this be accident? Can all this mean nothing? {p. 341} PART IV. (Conclusions) CHAPTER I. WAS PRE-GLACIAL MAN CIVILIZED? WE come now to another and very interesting question: In what stage of development was mankind when the Drift fell upon the earth?