The story of this one first man, who sinned by eating an apple from a certain forbidden tree, has been proved to be a _fable, a myth, an allegory_. The legend may shadow forth certain natural truths, but it is nevertheless a myth. The thing never occurred. The alleged facts are not facts. There was no first Adam. There may have been some one whom certain persons called the last Adam, but it is nevertheless true that what is said of him was founded upon an _unreality_—a thing which never happened. According to biblical chronology, the last Adam did not make his advent until about four thousand years after the first Adam fell, Even this seems to have been a long period to wait, but if we accept the interpretation of certain modern writers, that which is called “the beginning” in Genesis may have been forty thousand or four hundred thousand years before the advent of Jesus. True, this would show certain events to have been a very long way apart (for instance, the creation of Eve after that of Adam) and would make the work of Christ in the “redemptive act” occur ages and ages after the mischief was done. It is contended that the promise of the sending of a Saviour was made the very day that the first Adam sinned, and that the salvation of the sinner was conditioned upon man’s faith in, and acceptance of, the promise that in due time, not mentioned, the last Adam should come and repair all the mischief which the first Adam had caused. It is claimed by sacerdotalists that the saying in Genesis 3: 15 is the first promise of a Redeemer: “And I will put enmity between thee [the serpent] and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.” But these very words occur in the pagan fables that were written long before the time that I Genesis was written, and in some of these fables, much more consistently with the passage above quoted, the woman is represented as standing with her heel on the serpent’s head. Then it is claimed that the Creator accepted the sacrifice of Abel because it was a _bloody_ sacrifice, prefiguring the shedding of the _blood_ of Christ, and that he rejected the offering of Cain because there was no _blood_ in it. We have looked in vain through the Old-Testament Scriptures for a promise of the _last_ Adam who was to come and redeem man, but have failed to find it. A system of “redemption” that is based on expressions so enigmatical must have a very flimsy foundation upon which to stand. It is like the assumption that women generally have an aversion to reptiles because a serpent tempted Eve and brought so many curses on the sex. To such miserable subterfuges will sacerdotalists resort to maintain a theory.