same way that he made Adam and Eve?"

Carl blushed and was silent.

"You were not embarrassed when I spoke of the creation of Adam and Eve,
you have no reason to be embarrassed when I speak of the creation of
Cain. All was in accordance with the divine will, and must therefore be
right. We cannot say positively that God thought this or that, but we
have a right to judge from his acts what his purposes were. We have a
right to suppose that he created the earth intending to people it with
human beings. Of course every possible plan for doing this was open to
him. He might have created each individual as he did Adam, but what
would have been the result? We should have stood, each one alone, in
selfish solitariness, like a lot of ten-pins, able to knock each other
down but not to help each other up. Each one would have been thinking
only of himself and his own selfish interests. This plan could not
commend itself to a compassionate Creator, and we can imagine that he
would say to himself: 'That would never do. I must put these, my
children, in such relation to each other that they will have love for
each other; that they will be bound by ties so strong that nothing can
break them; they must be created in such a way that they will also
understand their relation to me and love me as their life-giver. To do
this I will share with them my greatest power, that of creation. I will
let them help me people the world. By this creative power they shall
come to understand how I, their heavenly Father, love them, and yearn
over them, and by their dependence as children upon their parents they
shall learn to depend upon and trust me.' From the plan God adopted for
peopling the earth we may suppose this to have been his process of
thought. So you see that sex comes as a wondrous gift from God, a gift
endowed with a marvelous power, and therefore to be held most sacred.
When I spoke of you as being almost a man it was with the thought that
now is being conferred upon you this gift of sex."

Carl looked up with some surprise. "Why, I have always been a boy."

"True. And a boy is a being who will become a man. But he is not endowed
with the functions of sex until he is about fourteen years old. Then sex
begins to make itself felt in his whole being. He grows taller rapidly;
he gains in breadth; he begins to see the long-looked-for mustache; he
notices the growth of the special organs of sex; he begins to feel more
manly; to enjoy the so