The serpent's promise to the woman was worthy of the wisest and most astute of animals. But with yet greater subtlety he might have declared, Except ye acquire the knowledge of good and evil, ye cannot come to be as gods; divine life can never be yours. Throughout the Christian world this legend of the lost paradise has figured as the story of the Fall of Man; and naturally, because of the theological use of it made by St. Paul, who first lifted the story into prominence in illustrating his theory of Christ as the second Adam: since by man came death into the world, by man came also the resurrection from death and from sin. That there is truth of the most vital sort in the Pauline theory is undeniable; but there are many things that will bear looking at from opposite points of view, for aspects of truth are often to be found on both sides of the shield, and there is a sense in which we may regard the loss of paradise as in itself the beginning of the Rise of Man. For this, indeed, we have already found some justification in the legend itself. It is in no spirit of paradox that I make this suggestion. The more patiently one scrutinizes the processes whereby things have come to be what they are, the more deeply is one impressed with its profound significance. FOOTNOTES: [1] Isaiah li. 3; Joel ii. 3; Ezekiel xxviii. 13, xxxi. 8, 9. [Illustration] II _The Pilgrim's Burden_ But before I can properly elucidate this view, and make clear what is meant by connecting the loss of innocence with the beginning of the Rise of Man, it is necessary to bestow a few words upon a well-worn theme, and recall to mind the helpless and hopeless bewilderment into which all theologies and all philosophies have been thrown by the problem of the existence of evil. From the ancient Greek and Hebrew thinkers who were saddened by the spectacle of wickedness insolent and unpunished, down to the aged Voltaire and the youthful Goethe who felt their theories of God's justice quite baffled by the Lisbon earthquake, or down to the atheistic pessimist of our own time who asserts that the Power which sustains the world is but a blind and terrible force without concern for man's welfare of body or of soul,--from first to last the history of philosophy teems with the mournful instances of this discouragement. In that tale of War and Peace wherein the fervid genius of Tolstoi has depicted scenes and characters of modern life with truthful grandeur like that of the ancient epic poems, when our friend, the genial and thoughtful hero of the story, stands in the public square at Moscow, uncertain of his fate, while the kindly bright-faced peasant and the eager pale young mechanic are shot dead by his side, and all for a silly suspicion on the part of Napoleon's soldiery; as he stands and sees the bodies, still warm and quivering, tossed into a trench and loose earth hastily shovelled over them, his manly heart surges in rebellion against