nd less science, musing upon the fortunes of man, his
wickedness, sorrow, death, and impressed with an instinctive
conviction that things could not always have been so, casting
about for some solution of the dim, pathetic problem, at last
struck out the beautiful and sublime poem recorded in Genesis,
which has now for many a century, by Jews, Christians,
Mohammedans, been credited as authentic history. With his own
hands God moulds from earth an image in his own likeness, breathes
life into it, and new made man moves, lord of the scene, and lifts
his face, illuminated with soul, in submissive love to his
Creator. Endowed with free will, after a while he violated his
Maker's command: the divine displeasure was awakened, punishment
ensued, and so rushed in the terrible host of ills under which we
suffer. The problem must early arise: the solution is, to a
certain stage of thought, at once the most obvious and the most
satisfactory conceivable. It is the truth. Only it is cast in
imaginative, not scientific, form, arrayed in emblematic, not
literal, garb. The Greeks had a lofty poem by some early unknown
author, setting forth how Prometheus formed man of clay and
animated him with fire from heaven, and how from Pandora's box the
horrid crew of human vexations were let into the world. The two
narratives, though most unequal in depth and dignity, belong in
the same literary and philosophical category. Neither was intended
as a plain record of veritable history, each word a naked fact,
but as a symbol of its author's thoughts, each phrase the
metaphorical dress of a speculative idea.

Eichhorn maintains, with no slight plausibility, that the whole
account of the Garden of Eden was derived from a series of
allegorical pictures which the author had seen, and which he
translated from the language of painting into the language of
words. At all events, we must take the account as symbolic, a
succession of figurative expressions. Many of the best minds have
always so considered it, from Josephus to Origen, from Ambrose to
Kant. What, then, are the real thoughts which the author of this
Hebrew poem on the primal condition of man meant to convey beneath
his legendary forms of imagery? These four are the essential ones.
First, that God created man; secondly, that he created him in a
state of freedom and happiness surrounded by blessings; third,
that the favored subject violated his Sovereign's order; fourth,
that in consequence of