sin. He contained all the souls of men in himself; and they all
sinned in him, their federal head and legal representative. When
the fatal fruit was plucked,

"Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat, Sighing through
all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost."

Earthquakes, tempests, pestilences, poverty, war, the endless
brood of distress, ensued. For then were

"Turn'd askance The poles of earth twice ten degrees and more
From the sun's axle, and with labor push'd Oblique the centric
globe."

Adam's transcendent faculties and gifts were darkened and
diminished in his depraved posterity, and all base propensities
let loose to torment, confuse, and degrade them. We can scarcely
form a conception of the genius, the beauty, the blessedness, of
the first man, say the theologians in chorus.11 Augustine
declares, "The most gifted of our time must be considered, when
compared with Adam in genius, as tortoises to birds in speed."
Adam, writes Dante, "was made from clay, accomplished with every
gift that life can teem with." Thomas Aquinas teaches that "he was
immortal by grace though not by nature, had universal knowledge,
fellowshipped with angels, and saw God." South, in his famous
sermon on "Man the Image of God," after an elaborate panegyric of
the wondrous majesty, wisdom, peacefulness, and bliss of man
before the fall, exclaims, "Aristotle was but the rubbish of an
Adam, and Athens the rudiments of Paradise!" Jean Paul has
amusingly burlesqued these conceits. "Adam, in his state of
innocence, possessed a knowledge of all the arts and sciences,
universal and scholastic history, the several penal and other
codes of law, and all the old dead languages, as well as the
living. He was, as it were, a living Pegasus and Pindus, a movable
lodge of sublime light, a royal literary society, a pocket seat of
the Muses, and a short golden age of Louis the Fourteenth!"

Adam has been called the Man without a Navel, because, not being
born of woman, there could be no umbilical cord to cut. The
thought goes deep. In addition to the mythico theological pictures
of the mechanical creation and superlative condition of the first
man, two forms of statement have been advanced by thoughtful
students of nature. One is the theory of chronological progressive
development; the other is the theory of the

11 Strauss gives a multitude of apposite quotations in his
Christliche Glaubenslehre, band i. s. 691, sect. 51, ff.