t colours.

THE FIRST SIN,

AS RECORDED IN THE BIBLE AND IN ANCIENT ORIENTAL TRADITION.

The idea of the Paradisiacal happiness of the earliest human beings
constitutes one of the most universal of traditions. According to the
Egyptians, the terrestrial reign of the God Ra, by which the existence
of the world and of humanity was inaugurated, was an age of gold, to
which Egyptians ever recurred regretfully; so that in order to convey
the idea of any given thing transcending imagination, they were in the
habit of affirming that "nothing had ever been seen like unto it since
the days of the God Ra."

This belief in an age of innocence and bliss, by which the career of
humanity began, is also to be met with amongst all peoples of Aryan or
Japhetic race, and was theirs anterior to their separation, the learned
having long agreed that this is one of the points on which Aryan
traditions are most plainly derivable from one common source with those
of the Semitic race, of which last Genesis affords us the expression.
But with Aryan nations this belief was closely linked with a conception
specially their own--that, namely, of four successive ages of the world;
and we find this conception attain to fullest development in India.
Created things, and among them humanity, are destined to endure for
12,000 divine years, each of which contains 360 years as reckoned by
men. This enormous period of time is divided into four ages or epochs:
the age of perfection, or _Kritayuga_; the age of the threefold
sacrifice--that is, the perfect accomplishment of all religious duties,
or _Tretayuga_; the age of doubt or of the obscuration of religious
notions, _Dvaparayuga_; finally, the age of perdition, or _Kaliyuga_,
which is the present age, only to be brought to a close by the
destruction of the world.[50] The Works and Days of Hesiod show us that
precisely the same succession of ages was held by the Greeks, but
without their duration being calculated by years, and with the
supposition of a new humanity being produced at the beginning of each;
the gradual degeneracy, however, which marks this succession of ages is
expressed by the metals after which they are named--gold, silver, brass,
and iron. Our present humanity belongs to the age of iron, and is the
worst of all, although it began with the heroes. Zoroastrian Mazdeism
also admits this theory of the four ages, and we find it expressed in
the _Bundehesh_,[51] but under a form less