halt surely
die." Nay, said the Devil, when he began business "ye shall not surely
die; for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes
shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Every
word of his speech was true. Instead of dying "in the day" that he ate
of the fruit Adam lived to the fine old age of nine hundred and thirty
years.

And after the "fall" the Lord God said, "Behold, the man is become as
one of us, to know good and evil." The Devil's truthfulness is thus
amply vindicated.

Satan's visit to Eve was paid in the form of a serpent. She manifested
no astonishment at being accosted by such a creature. It may be that the
whole menagerie of Eden spoke in the human tongue, and that Balaam's
ass was only what the biologists would call "a case of reversion" to
the primitive type. Josephus and most of the Fathers conceived of the
serpent as having had originally a human voice and legs; so that if he
could not have walked about with Eve arm in arm, he might at least have
accompanied her in a dance. Milton, however, discredits the legs, and
represents the serpent thus:

"Not with indented wave,
Prone on the ground, as since, but on his rear,
Circular base of rising folds, that towered,
Fold above fold, a surging maze, his head
Crested aloft, and carbuncle his eyes;
With burnish'd neck of verdant gold, erect
Amidst his circling spires, that on the grass
Floated redundant."

Very splendid! But the doctors differ, and who shall decide? What
followed the eating of the forbidden fruit we have dealt with in "Eve
and the Apple." We shall therefore at once come to the curse pronounced
upon the serpent "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou
hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast
of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all
the days of thy life: and I will put enmity between thee and the woman,
and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou
shalt bruise his heel."

The final portion of this curse is flagrantly mythological Among the
Hindoos, Krishna also, as the incarnation of Vishnu, is represented
now as treading on the bruised head of a conquered serpent, and now
as entwined by it, and stung in the heel. In Egyptian pictures and
sculptures, likewise, the serpent is seen pierced through the head by
the spear of the goddess Isis. The "enmity" be