Under the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about the middle of the second century B.C., their very religion seemed likely to be crushed out by merciless persecution. It was no wonder that the serious minds of the day became inclined to look upon the present as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder of what had once been an ideal world. This tendency showed itself in various ways, the chief of which was a looking back to the great days of David and Solomon as the period of Israel's brightest splendour and prosperity. Of this I must say a little more presently when we come to consider the genesis of the idea of the kingdom of God. Another way in which the same tendency showed itself was that of taking the legend of the Fall more or less literally. A suffering generation could hardly help thinking of their woes as being the result of some primitive act of transgression. This is the way in which the rabbis came to speak of the Fall as being an actual fact of religious and ethical importance. +The doctrine transferred to Christianity.+--A similar set of political and social conditions carried the doctrine over into Christianity, chiefly through the influence of the apostle Paul who had received a rabbinical training. Not only Hebrews but Greeks had begun to feel that the world was decaying and perhaps nearing the end. They idealised the past and contrasted it with the present. All civilisation lay under the dominion of Rome, and Rome herself was subject to a military dictator. The heart of the world-wide empire was a hotbed of corruption where every form of vice took root and flourished. The Greek thinkers and scholars despised their masters, but their own heroic days were gone and they were helpless to cast off the yoke. They had no Pericles now, no Leonidas, no Miltiades. Gone were the men of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis. These were lesser, darker days. With a sure instinct men were ceasing to feel any confidence in the future of this pagan civilisation. It had its great elements, but the signs of disruption were already apparent and no one could foresee what would take its place. The mood of the time is reflected in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmosphere came Christianity with its doctrine of the holy love of God and its adoring faith in Jesus. But both Judaism and Hellenism had already the tendency to look back toward a better and happier time and to think of the present as a fall from it. Paul felt this like everyone else, and forthwith took some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took the Genesis story literally or not, and he certainly made Adam the type of the unideal or earthly man who had become estranged from God. He was too great a man to be pinned down to mere literalism in a question of this kind, so in his use of the terms supplied by the rabbinical version of the legend