The conservative Christian believes that man was originally endowed with a lofty moral nature; that he succumbed to temptation; that he became a degraded being; that he has been working out his punishment ever since; and that his hope of escape from the curse laid upon all mankind lies in the atonement made by Jesus Christ. Even if inclined to have views less strictly in accord with the Christian teaching of the past eighteen hundred years, he still believes that all this is true in some sort of allegorical sense which cannot be exactly defined. Lastly, there is an ever-swelling host of perplexed Christians who, in their heart of hearts, feel much as Mr. Blatchford does when he says: "God is all-powerful. He could have made Adam strong enough to resist Eve. He could have made Eve strong enough to resist the serpent. He need not have made the serpent at all. God is all-knowing. Therefore, when He made Adam and Eve and the serpent He knew that Adam and Eve must fall. And if God knew they must fall, how could Adam help falling, and how could he justly be blamed for doing what he must do? God made a bridge--built it Himself, of His own materials, to His own design, and knew what the bearing strain of the bridge was. If, then, God put upon the bridge a weight equal to double the bearing strain, how could God justly blame the bridge for falling?" [181] The average divine, whatever his denomination, is usually in no hurry to accept Evolutionist theories of the Fall, or, if he does, he keeps it to himself. Dean Wace thinks the tale of Eden and the Fall is partly historical, partly allegorical, and, in any case, true to Christian experience; and Cardinal Newman considered that the whole orthodox Christian scheme stood or fell with a belief in some great "aboriginal catastrophe." Progressive divines teach, on the contrary, that the narrative of the Fall is not to be understood as literal history, any more than the visions of the Apocalypse are to be understood as a literal description of heaven. "For us," they say, "the underlying truth, and not the outward form in which that truth is clothed, is the essential thing." [As our first parents are represented as being in a state of guileless simplicity, and subsequently falling in with the tempting serpent, who, in obvious contrast with their untried innocence, is described as a being of special subtilty, the "underlying truth" appears to be that, with God's cognisance, man is continually being taken advantage of by a crafty spirit of evil; or, to keep more closely to the religious evolutionist's idea, man's better nature, implanted by God, is being continually got the better of by animal instincts implanted by ----?] These enlightened clerics are in a somewhat delicate position, and none probably recognise this more than they do themselves, as testified lately by the fact of over a hundred of their number distributing a manifesto to all the clergy