ON THE SPURIOUS BIBLE 217 



while he was asleep he took one of his ribs, out of 

 which he fashioned Woman, the helpmate for Man. 1 



1 " Feeling, evidently, rather than understanding, induces most 

 people to combat the theory of their ' descent from Apes.' It is simply 

 because the organism of the Ape appears a caricature of Man, a dis- 

 torted likeness of ourselves in a not very attractive form, because the 

 customary aesthetic ideas and self-glorification of Man are touched by 

 this in so sensitive a point, that most men shrink from recognizing 

 their descent from Apes. It seems much pleasanter to be descended 

 from a more highly developed, divine being, and hence, as is well 

 known, human vanity has, from the earliest times, nattered itself by 

 assuming the original descent of the race from gods or demi-gods. 

 The church, with that sophistical distortion of ideas of which she is 

 so great an adept, has managed to extol this ridiculous pride as 

 Christian humility ; and those people who reject with haughty horror 

 every suggestion of descent from lower animals, and consider them- 

 selves children of God, those very people are exceedingly fond of 

 boasting about their childlike humility of spirit. In most of the 

 sermons delivered against the progress of the doctrine of evolution, 

 human vanity and conceit play throughout a prominent part ; and, 

 although we have inherited this characteristic weakness from Apes, 

 yet we must confess to having developed it to a degree of perfection 

 which completely overthrows the unprejudiced judgment of the 

 ' sound understanding of man.' We ridicule the childish follies 

 occasioned by the pride of ancestry among the nobility, from the 

 splendid Middle Ages down to our own time, and yet no small portion 

 of this groundless pride of nobility lurks in a great majority of men. 

 Just as most people prefer to trace their pedigree from a decayed 

 baron or, if possible, from a celebrated prince, rather than from an 

 uiikno'wn, humble peasant, so they prefer seeing the progenitor of 

 the human race in an Adam degraded by the Fall, rather than in 

 an Ape capable of higher development and progress. It is a matter 

 of taste, and such genealogical preferences do not, therefore, admit of 

 discussion. Still, I must confess that, personally, I am as proud of 

 my paternal grandfather, who was simply a Silesiaii peasant, as of 

 my maternal grandfather, who raised himself from the position of a 

 Rhenish lawyer to the highest posts in the council of state. And it is 

 also much more to my individual taste to be the more highly developed 

 descendant of a primaeval Ape ancestor, who, in the struggle for 



