This is an ingenious device, but it will hardly satisfy sound thinkers. The question is, whether the story of Adam is historical truth or pagan fiction. The highest scholarship pronounces it fiction, while certain orthodox writers admit the fact “that God used prevailing but unreal fancies to teach important truths.” The document in which the story of the fall is found is a confused, inconsistent, and absurd compilation by at least two different writers, representing each a different God, Jehovah and Elohim, the writers contradicting each other in many particulars; and this feet is admitted by candid Christian writers, and by none more frankly than the late Dean Stanley of the English Establishment. The first account of creation ends at the third verse of Gen. 2, and the second account begins with the fourth verse and closes with the end of that chapter. In the first account the man and woman are created together on the sixth and last day of creation (Gen. 1:28). In the second account the beasts and birds are created after the creation of the man and before the creation of the woman; and it was not until after Adam had examined and named all the beasts of the fields, and had failed to find among the apes, chimpanzees, and ourangs a suitable companion for himself, that Eve was made from one of Adam’s ribs, taken from his primeval anatomy while under the influence of a divine anaesthetic (Gen. 2:7, 8, 15, 22). In the first account man was made on the last day, and woman was made at the same time; in the second account man was made after the plants and herbs, but before fruit trees, beasts, and birds. So it would seem that, inasmuch as woman was made after all things, she was an afterthought, a sort of necessary evil for the solace and comfort of man. These contradictions run through the whole of the first and second chapters of Genesis, and plainly show that these narratives were compiled by two different persons from vague traditions or from different written documents. Had the Creator undertaken to write or dictate an account of his own work, he certainly would not have contradicted himself six times within the limit of a few lines.