imitive legend into a religious dogma. The
Jewish nation has fallen upon evil days. For generations after the
great captivity they had been ground under the heel of a succession of
foreign masters. Under the cruel rule of Antiochus Epiphanes, about
the middle of the second century B.C., their very religion seemed
likely to be crushed out by merciless persecution. It was no wonder
that the serious minds of the day became inclined to look upon the
present as being but the ruin of the past, the sorry remainder of what
had once been an ideal world. This tendency showed itself in various
ways, the chief of which was a looking back to the great days of David
and Solomon as the period of Israel's brightest splendour and
prosperity. Of this I must say a little more presently when we come to
consider the genesis of the idea of the kingdom of God. Another way in
which the same tendency showed itself was that of taking the legend of
the Fall more or less literally. A suffering generation could hardly
help thinking of their woes as being the result of some primitive act
of transgression. This is the way in which the rabbis came to speak of
the Fall as being an actual fact of religious and ethical importance.

+The doctrine transferred to Christianity.+--A similar set of political
and social conditions carried the doctrine over into Christianity,
chiefly through the influence of the apostle Paul who had received a
rabbinical training. Not only Hebrews but Greeks had begun to feel
that the world was decaying and perhaps nearing the end. They
idealised the past and contrasted it with the present. All
civilisation lay under the dominion of Rome, and Rome herself was
subject to a military dictator. The heart of the world-wide empire was
a hotbed of corruption where every form of vice took root and
flourished. The Greek thinkers and scholars despised their masters,
but their own heroic days were gone and they were helpless to cast off
the yoke. They had no Pericles now, no Leonidas, no Miltiades. Gone
were the men of Thermopylae, Marathon, and Salamis. These were lesser,
darker days. With a sure instinct men were ceasing to feel any
confidence in the future of this pagan civilisation. It had its great
elements, but the signs of disruption were already apparent and no one
could foresee what would take its place. The mood of the time is
reflected in the pages of Tacitus and Juvenal. Into this atmosphere
came Christiani