emale created he them; and blessed them and called their name Adam in
the day when they were created. And Adam lived an hundred and thirty
years and begat _a son_ in his own likeness, after his image; and called
his name Seth." I find it impossible to read this passage without being
convinced that, when the writer says Adam was made in the likeness of
Elohim, he means the same sort of likeness as when he says that Seth was
begotten in the likeness of Adam. Whence it follows that his conception
of Elohim was completely anthropomorphic.

In all this narrative I can discover nothing which differentiates it, in
principle, from other ancient cosmogonies, except the rejection of all
gods, save the vague, yet anthropomorphic, Elohim, and the assigning
to them anteriority and superiority to the world. It is as utterly
irreconcilable with the assured truths of modern science, as it is
with the account of the origin of man, plants, and animals given by the
writer of the second chief constituent of the Hexateuch in the second
chapter of Genesis. This extraordinary story starts with the assumption
of the existence of a rainless earth, devoid of plants and herbs of the
field. The creation of living beings begins with that of a solitary man;
the next thing that happens is the laying out of the Garden of Eden, and
the causing the growth from its soil of every tree "that is pleasant to
the sight and good for food"; the third act is the formation out of the
ground of "every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air";
the fourth and last, the manufacture of the first woman from a rib,
extracted from Adam, while in a state of anaesthesia.

Yet there are people who not only profess to take this monstrous legend
seriously, but who declare it to be reconcilable with the Elohistic
account of the creation!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: _The Nineteenth Century,_ 1886.]

[Footnote 2: Both dolphins and dugongs occur in the Red Sea, porpoises
and dolphins in the Mediterranean; so that the "Mosaic writer" may have
been acquainted with them.]

[Footnote 3: I said nothing about "the greater number of schools of
Greek philosophy," as Mr. Gladstone implies that I did, but expressly
spoke of the "founders of Greek philosophy."]

[Footnote 4: See Heinze, _Die Lehre vom Logos,_ p. 9 _et seq._]

[Footnote 5: Reprinted in _Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews,_ 1870.]

[Footnote 6: "Ancient," doubtless, but his antiquity must not be
exagger