ard,
in search of knowledge and a higher and better and broader and larger
life, that always entails its penalties of trial, suffering, toil, and
more or less disappointment?

When God comes to call them to account, Adam puts the blame on his
wife, and she shifts it to the serpent. Note what follows: The serpent
is cursed to crawl upon his belly, just as we see him now. Did he walk
uprightly before, and did he have legs and feet? "And dust shalt thou
eat all the days of thy life." What did he eat before? As a matter of
fact, serpents do not eat dust now. Remember, this sentence was
pronounced _to the serpent_ himself: "And Jehovah God said unto the
serpent,"--not to Adam and Eve. We shall have occasion to recall this
again.

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy
conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children..." This was the
penalty pronounced upon Eve for her part in the tragedy. The question
arises: Was Eve never to be a mother but for this transaction? This,
if not the only, is at least the most natural inference. Then how was
the race to be propagated? or was it to be propagated at all?

Adam for his part was condemned to hard labor, and altho creation was
supposed to have been finished and complete, the ground was cursed so
as to make it produce thorns and thistles to annoy and tantalize him
and increase his labor. Were none of these things on the earth before?
Were the rose bushes in the Garden of Eden "thornless"? "In the sweat
of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground: for
out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return."

Several questions arise here. Was Adam to be immortal in the flesh if
he had not eaten of the forbidden fruit? Did death enter the world, as
we have always been taught, because of this sin? And if Adam had not
sinned would he and Eve still be living in the Garden of Eden, without
the knowledge of good and evil, naked and unashamed to this day? If
Eve was never to become a mother if she had not sinned, would she and
Adam still be there alone, with nothing but the animal world about them
for companions?

And if death only entered the world because of sin, why does all nature
die? Man alone was capable of sin, and according to the story, man
alone sinned,--unless we include the serpent. Yet, not a beast of the
field, a fowl of the air, a fish of the deep, nor a reptile or creeping
thi