It does not seem to me, then, that Christianity is really bound up with anything more than the unity of the human race, which science also strongly asserts. But to pass from these positions, which may be regarded as certain, to something more conjectural (apart from any question of the literary character of Genesis iii), we may argue thus: Sin is a fact having the same character universally in human history, though the sense of sin has varied greatly, reaching back as far as human history extends. This would lead us to suppose that it goes back to the roots of the race. It suggests some original {230} fall, some tainting of the race in its origin. I do not see, then, anything absurd or contrary to evidence in such a hypothesis as this.--The Divine Spirit is assumed to be at work in all the development of the world. The 'laws of nature' are but His methods. At a certain moment a new thing had emerged in the universe hitherto inorganic. It was the fact of life. It was new[13]. But it was in continuity with what had gone before. This principle of life had its great development, vegetable and animal. It had attained a form in certain anthropoid apes such as we are familiar with in men. Suppose then that the Divine Spirit breathes Himself, again in a new way, into one single pair or group of these anthropoid animals. There is lodged in them for the first time a germ of spiritual consciousness, continuous with animal intelligence, and yet distinct from it. From this pair or group humanity has its origin. If they and their offspring had been true to their spiritual capacities the animal nature would have been more rapidly spiritualized in motives and tendencies. Development--physical, moral, spiritual--would have been steady and glorious. Whereas there was a fall at the very root of our humanity; and the fall was repeated and reiterated and renewed, and the development of our manhood was tainted and spoiled. There was a lapse into approximately animal condition, which is dimly known to us as primitive savagery. So that the condition of savage man is a parody of what God intended man in his undeveloped stages to be, just as the condition of civilized man in London and Paris is a parody of what God intended developed man to come to. And there have been long and dreary epochs when men have {231} seemed to lose almost all human ideals and divine aspirations; when, in St. Paul's phrase, they were 'alive without the law,' living a physical life unvisited by the remorse consequent upon any knowledge of better things. And there have been, on the other hand, epochs and special occasions of spiritual opportunity and spiritual restorations. And so, on the whole, side by side with the continually deteriorating effect of sin, has gone on the slow process of redemption, the undoing of the evil of sin and the realization of the divine purpose for man. Such an idea of human history, partly only hypothetical, partly assured, conflicts with no