From the first dawning of human reason, even in the mind of inquisitive childhood, questions like these have been revolved, if not formulated: Did not God know, when he made Adam and Eve, that they would fall? Why, then, did he create them? Why did he create a subtle serpent to tempt them? Why did he create a tree the fruit of which was forbidden? Why did he make the possible everlasting ruin of innumerable unborn mortals depend on such a trivial act as the eating of a certain apple? Why did he not destroy Adam and Eve after their first act of disobedience, and thus prevent them from propagating a faithless progeny, which should increase in geometrical progression until the number should be so great as to exhaust calculation with weariness, stagger reason itself, and transcend even the powers of the loftiest imagination to conceive? Why are the teeming millions of the children of Adam held virtually responsible for this single trivial act of disobedience by an unknown remote ancestor myriads of ages ago? How could all men sin in him and fall with him in the first transgression? How could the guilt of Adam’s sin be imputed to his children? The circumstances connected with the degradation of man are so extraordinary that it is not unreasonable to inquire whether the narrative of the fall is a matter of supernatural revelation based upon an historic occurrence, or whether it is purely mythical, portraying the conceptions of the human mind as to the origin of evil at some remote period of the world’s childhood. For the support of the dogma of total depravity through the fall of Adam theologians rely primarily upon the account in the book of Genesis. It is a notable fact that Adam and Eve are not historically recognized in any other portion of the Old Testament, and their very existence was totally ignored by the Teacher of Nazareth, if the Gospels said to contain the only report of his teachings are to be credited. Nobody pretends that Moses, the doubtful author of the Pentateuch, wrote from personal knowledge; but it is claimed that he wrote under inspiration of God, though there is not a single intimation in Genesis or any other book that he was so inspired, or that God had anything more to do with his writings than he had with the writings of Homer, Herodotus, or John Milton. But the assumption that the dogma of the fall through the sin of Adam was first revealed to Moses—at most not more then eight or nine hundred years before the Christian era—is plainly exploded by the fact that this story existed among many nations centuries and centuries before Moses is said to have been born or the writing called Genesis existed.