That man is not perfect in morality is as true as that he is not perfect in body nor in mentality. But does not every one know by his own experience and observation that human shortcomings mainly arise from a want of perfect development and the influence of environment, rather than from essential, innate viciousness? What is called “sin” should be known as “undevelopment,” and, as real as is the law of heredity, it is no more real than the law of environment. Where there is evidence of hereditary evil tendencies it is not necessary to go back more than two or three generations to find the source. But the fact must here be emphasized and continually kept in mind that the story of Eden and the fall is substantially found in the annals of many nations anterior to the existence of the Jewish tribes, varied only in trivial matters. The story of the serpent in Eden is probably of Aryan source, to which the conception of the satanic origin of evil was attached after the Jews came into close contact with Persian dualistic ideas. To doubt which was the original and which the copy, shows, regarding the well-established facts of history, a want of information so great as to make argument on this matter quite useless. The conclusion is inevitable that if the fall of Adam is a fiction, then the entire system of evangelical theology is based upon a fiction; and the fruit must be natural to the tree—a fictitious tree can only bear fictitious fruit. Orthodox theologians, especially of the logical Presbyterian stamp, realize that if they give up Adam and Eve as progenitors of the entire human race, they give up the very foundation-stones of the “redemptive scheme.” This accounts for Presbyterian opposition to the doctrine of evolution. They are logical enough to see that the second Adam as a Saviour in the evangelical sense must share the fate of the first Adam; and so Professor Woodrow of South Carolina has recently been degraded on account of his theory of evolution. The world moves, and, as Professor Marsh of Yale College has well said, “The doctrine of evolution is as thoroughly demonstrated as the Copernican system of astronomy.”