, with their relations of family.
He has to teach the essential supremacy of man among creatures, the
subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man, the
original declension of man's will from the divine path, the dim and
distant but sure hope of man's restoration. These are not, and cannot
be, lessons of science. They are worked out into the allegory of the
Garden of Eden. But in this allegory there is nothing whatever that
crosses the path of science, nor is it for reasons of science that so
many great Christian thinkers from the earliest age of the Church
downwards have pronounced it an allegory. The spiritual truth contained
in it is certainly the purpose for which it is told; and evolution such
as science has rendered probable had done its work in forming man such
as he is before the narrative begins.

It may be said that it seems inconsistent with the dignity of man's
nature as described in the Bible to believe that his formation was
effected by any process of evolution, still more by any such process of
evolution as would represent him to have been an animal before he became
a man.

But, in the first place, it is to be observed that Science does not yet
assert, and there is no reason to believe that it ever will assert, that
man became a fully developed animal, with the brute instincts and
inclinations, appetites and passions, fully formed, an animal such as we
see other animals now, before he passed on into a man such as man is
now. His body may have been developed according to the theory of
Evolution, yet along a parallel but independent line of its own; but at
any rate it branched off from other animals at a very early point in
the descent of animal life. And, further, as Science cannot yet assert
that life was not introduced into the world when made habitable by a
direct creative act, so too Science cannot yet assert, and it is
tolerably certain will never assert, that the higher and added life, the
spiritual faculty, which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not
given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to
be the seat and the instrument of that spiritual faculty had been
sufficiently developed to receive it. That the body should have been
first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either
have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of
God,--this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the
Bible tells nor w