Fathers said, in effect, "It was through woman wanting to know
something that sin came into this world; therefore let her hereafter
want to know nothing." They taught that a desire for knowledge on the
part of woman was the greatest crime ever committed on this earth, and
that it so enraged God that he punished it by death and by every curse
known to man. When it was pointed out that animals had lived and _died_
on this earth long before man could have lived, they said that God
knew Adam was going to live and Eve was going to sin, so he _made death
retroactive_ because Adam would represent all animals when he should be
created!

All this was thought and done and taught in order to agree with the
silly story of the "fall of man in the Garden of Eden," which every one
acquainted with the simple rudiments of science or the history of the
races knows to be a childish legend of an undeveloped people. Instead of
a "fall" from perfect beginnings, there has been and is a constant rise
in the moral as well as in the mental and physical conditions of man.
The type is higher, the race nobler and nearer perfection than it ever
was before; and the stories of our Bible are the same as those of
all other Bibles, simply the effort of ignorant or imaginative men
to account for the origin and destiny of things of which they had no
accurate knowledge.*

* One of the simplest and most interesting explanations of
this latter point will be found in "The Childhood of
Religions," by Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., where the Christian
reader may be surprised to find that the "ten-commandment"
idea (with a number of them which apply to general morals,
as "Thou shalt not kill," etc.) is not confined to our
Bible, but is found also in the Buddhist Bible in the same
form; that the "golden rule" was given by Confucius 500
years before Christ; and that Christianity, when taken as it
should be with the other great religions and examined in the
same way, presents no problem, no claim, and no proofs which
are not found in equal strength in one or more of the other
forms of faith. In the matters of morality, miracles, and
power to attract and "comfort" multitudes of people, it
ranks neither first nor last. It is simply one of several,
and in no essential matter is it different from them.

St. Paul said, "If they [women] will learn _anything_, let them ask
their husbands at home;"