least feel--if not to be--somewhat "better." Philosophers may bid him be
content; and tell him that he is what he ought to be, and what nature has
made him. But he cares nothing for the philosophers. He knows, usually,
that he is not what he ought to be; that he carries about with him, in
most cases, a body more or less diseased and decrepit, incapable of doing
all the work which he feels that he himself could do, or expressing all
the emotions which he himself longs to express; a dull brain and dull
senses, which cramp the eager infinity within him; as--so Goethe once
said with pity--the horse's single hoof cramps the fine intelligence and
generosity of his nature, and forbids him even to grasp an object, like
the more stupid cat, and baser monkey. And man has a self, too, within,
from which he longs too often to escape, as from a household ghost; who
pulls out, at unfortunately rude and unwelcome hours, the ledger of
memory. And so when the tempter--be he who he may--says to him "Take
this, and you will 'feel better'--Take this, and you shall be as gods,
knowing good and evil:" then, if the temptation was, as the old story
says, too much for man while healthy and unfallen, what must it be for
his unhealthy and fallen children? In vain we say to man--

"'Tis life, not death, for which you pant;
'Tis life, whereof your nerves are scant;
More life, and fuller, that you want."

And your tree of knowledge is not the tree of life: it is, in every case,
the tree of death; of decrepitude, madness, misery. He prefers the voice
of the tempter--"Thou shalt not surely die." Nay, he will say at
last,--"Better be as gods awhile, and die: than be the crawling,
insufficient thing I am; and live."

He--did I say? Alas! I must say she likewise. The sacred story is only
too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling, not merely at
the same time as the man, but before the man. Only let us remember that
it represents the woman as tempted; tempted, seemingly, by a rational
being, of lower race, and yet of superior cunning; who must, therefore,
have fallen before the woman. Who or what the being was, who is called
the Serpent in our translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say. We
have absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical
traditions need trouble no man much. But I fancy that a missionary,
preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them plainly that the
"Serpent" meant t