and extracting
from his side, with evident effort, the first woman.

This view of the general process of creation had come from far,
appearing under varying forms in various ancient cosmogonies. In
the Egyptian temples at Philae and Denderah may still be seen
representations of the Nile gods modelling lumps of clay into men, and
a similar work is ascribed in the Assyrian tablets to the gods of
Babylonia. Passing into our own sacred books, these ideas became the
starting point of a vast new development of theology.(11)

(11) For representations of Egyptian gods creating men out of lumps
of clay, see Maspero and Sayce, The Dawn of History, p. 156; for the
Chaldean legends of the creation of men and animals, see ibid., p. 543;
see also George Smith, Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition,
pp. 36, 72, and 93; also for similar legends in other ancient nations,
Lenormant, Origines de l'Histoire, pp. 17 et seq.; for mediaeval
representations of the creation of man and woman, see Didron,
Iconographie, pp. 35, 178, 224, 537.

The fathers of the Church generally received each of the two conflicting
creation legends in Genesis literally, and then, having done their best
to reconcile them with each other and to mould them together, made them
the final test of thought upon the universe and all things therein. At
the beginning of the fourth century Lactantius struck the key-note of
this mode of subordinating all other things in the study of creation to
the literal text of Scripture, and he enforces his view of the creation
of man by a bit of philology, saying the final being created "is called
man because he is made from the ground--homo ex humo."

In the second half of the same century this view as to the literal
acceptance of the sacred text was reasserted by St. Ambrose, who, in his
work on the creation, declared that "Moses opened his mouth and poured
forth what God had said to him." But a greater than either of them
fastened this idea into the Christian theologies. St. Augustine,
preparing his Commentary on the Book of Genesis, laid down in one famous
sentence the law which has lasted in the Church until our own time:
"Nothing is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since
greater is that authority than all the powers of the human mind." The
vigour of the sentence in its original Latin carried it ringing down the
centuries: "Major est Scripturae auctoritas quam omnis humani ingenii
capacitas."