it being most acceptable to the Persian, the Platonic to the Hellenistic
Jew. But the purer theology of the Jew forced him to look for a solution
of the question which Plato had left doubtful, and to explain how evil
had crept into matter. He could not allow that what God had created
could be of its own nature imperfect. God made it very good; some other
cause had broken in to spoil it. Accordingly, as before he had reduced
the independent Arimanes, whose existence he had learnt at Babylon, into
a subordinate spirit; so now, not questioning the facts of disease, of
death, of pain, or of the infirmity of the flesh which the natural
strength of the spirit was unable to resist, he accounted for them under
the supposition that the first man had deliberately sinned, and by his
sin had brought a curse upon the whole material earth, and upon all
which was fashioned out of it. The earth was created pure and lovely--a
garden of delight, loading itself of its own free accord with fruit and
flower, and everything most exquisite and beautiful. No bird or beast of
prey broke the eternal peace which reigned over its hospitable surface.
In calm and quiet intercourse, the leopard lay down by the kid, the lion
browsed beside the ox, and the corporeal frame of man, knowing neither
decay nor death, nor unruly appetite, nor any change or infirmity, was
pure as the immortal substance of the unfallen angels.

But with the fatal apple all this fair scene passed away, and creation
as it seemed was hopelessly and irretrievably ruined. Adam sinned--no
matter how, he sinned; the sin was the one terrible fact: moral evil was
brought into the world by the only creature who was capable of
committing it. Sin entered in, and death by sin; death and disease,
storm and pestilence, earthquake and famine. The imprisoned passions of
the wild animals were let loose, and earth and air became full of
carnage: worst of all, man's animal nature came out in gigantic
strength--the carnal lusts, unruly appetites, jealousies, hatreds,
rapines, and murders; and then the law, and with it, of course, breaches
of the law, and sin on sin. The seed of Adam was infected in the animal
change which had passed over Adam's person, and every child, therefore,
thenceforth naturally engendered in his posterity, was infected with the
curse which he had incurred. Every material organisation thenceforward
contained in itself the elements of its own destruction, and the
philosophic