to
imagine what the angels would say, so that his own good impulses (which
create those angels) may gain in authority, and none of the dangers that
surround his poor life make the least impression upon him until he
hears that there are hobgoblins hiding in the wood. His moral life, to
take shape at all, must appear to him in fantastic symbols. The history
of these symbols is therefore the history of his soul.

[Sidenote: The brief drama of things.]

There was in the beginning, so runs the Christian story, a great
celestial King, wise and good, surrounded by a court of winged musicians
and messengers. He had existed from all eternity, but had always
intended, when the right moment should come, to create temporal beings,
imperfect copies of himself in various degrees. These, of which man was
the chief, began their career in the year 4004 B.C., and they would live
on an indefinite time, possibly, that chronological symmetry might not
be violated, until A.D. 4004. The opening and close of this drama were
marked by two magnificent tableaux. In the first, in obedience to the
word of God, sun, moon, and stars, and earth with all her plants and
animals, assumed their appropriate places, and nature sprang into being
with all her laws. The first man was made out of clay, by a special act
of God, and the first woman was fashioned from one of his ribs,
extracted while he lay in a deep sleep. They were placed in an orchard
where they often could see God, its owner, walking in the cool of the
evening. He suffered them to range at will and eat of all the fruits he
had planted save that of one tree only. But they, incited by a devil,
transgressed this single prohibition, and were banished from that
paradise with a curse upon their head, the man to live by the sweat of
his brow and the woman to bear children in labour. These children
possessed from the moment of conception the inordinate natures which
their parents had acquired. They were born to sin and to find disorder
and death everywhere within and without them.

At the same time God, lest the work of his hands should wholly perish,
promised to redeem in his good season some of Adam's children and
restore them to a natural life. This redemption was to come ultimately
through a descendant of Eve, whose foot should bruise the head of the
serpent. But it was to be prefigured by many partial and special
redemptions. Thus, Noah was to be saved from the deluge, Lot from Sodom,
Isaac f