rpent Assap is no
longer the storm-cloud but the personification of darkness, which the
sun, under the form of Ra or Horus, encounters during his nocturnal
passage through the lower hemisphere, and has to triumph over before he
appears in the east. Thus, the conflict between Horus and Assap is daily
renewed at the seventh hour of the night, a little before the rising of
the sun, and the "Book of the Dead" shows that this strife between light
and darkness was taken by the Egyptians as the emblem of the moral
strife between good and evil. Neither is the serpent the mere
storm-cloud in those paradisiac legends of Chaldea and Phoenicia in
which we have been able to discern a relation in form to the record in
Genesis. The aspect of the cloud lengthening out in the sky may, indeed
(I could not positively deny it without more positive certainty) have
furnished the first germ of the idea of constituting the serpent the
visible image of the adverse power, combining the intimately associated
ideas of darkness and of evil--a notion from which, by a confusion of
the physical and moral orders, no ancient religion, not even Mazdeism,
was entirely able to free itself, unless it were that of the Hebrews.
But with all the highly civilized peoples whose traditions we have
scrutinized, the great serpent symbolizes that dark and evil power in
its widest significance.

But be this as it may, my faith as a Christian finds no difficulty in
admitting that, in order to relate the fall of the first pair, the
inspired compiler of Genesis made use of a narrative which had assumed
an entirely mythical character among neighbouring peoples, and that the
form of a serpent assigned to the tempter may have had for
starting-point an essentially naturalistic symbol. Nothing obliges us to
understand the third chapter of Genesis literally. Without any departure
from orthodoxy we are justified in looking upon it as a figure intended
to convey a fact of a purely moral order. It is not, therefore, the form
of the narrative that signifies here, but rather the dogma that it
expresses, and this dogma of the fall of the human race through the bad
use that its earliest progenitors made of their free will, remains an
eternal truth which is nowhere else brought out with the same precision.
It affords the only solution of the formidable problem which constantly
returns to rear itself before the human mind, and which no religious
philosophy outside of revelation has ev