218 WHAT IS LIFE? 



And this is the absolutely childish tale the nineteenth 

 century is taught to believe by priestcraft ! 



Then comes the absurd legend of the Serpent tempt- 

 ing man. 1 We have no idea what sort of creature this 

 serpent was, only that he was apparently a being which 

 had limbs, because the curse of God after his successful 

 temptation of Eve and Adam was, that he should move 

 only upon his belly. 



Now what is the record of this temptation ? God 



existence, had developed progressively from lower Mammals, as they 

 from still lower Vertebrates, than the degraded descendant of an 

 Adam, god-like, but debased by the Fall, who was formed from a clod 

 of earth, and of an Eve. created from a rib of Adam. As regards 

 this celebrated ' rib,' I must here expressly add as a supplement to 

 the history of the development of the skeleton, that the number of 

 ribs is the same in man and in woman." (" The Evolution of Man," 

 Prof. Ernst Haeckel, 1883, vol. ii. p. -Mo.) 



1 " From the Assyrian researches as well as from other sources, it 

 has come to be acknowledged by the most eminent scholars at the 

 leading seats of Christian learning that the accounts of creation with 

 which for nearly two thousand years all scientific discoveries have had 

 to be ' reconciled ' the accounts which blocked the way of Coperni- 

 cus, and Galileo, and Xewton, and Laplace were simply transcribed 

 or evolved from a mass of myths and legends largely derived by the 

 Hebrews from their ancient relations with Chaldea, rewrought in a 

 monotheistic sense, imperfectly welded together, and then thrown 

 into poetic forms in the sacred books which we have inherited." 

 (" A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christen- 

 dom," A. D. White, 1896, vol. i. p. 22.) 



" I have dwelt at some length on the ancient religions, for 

 nothing tends more to open the mind, and break down the narrow 

 barriers of sectarian prejudice, than to see how the ideas which we 

 have believed to be the peculiar possession of our own religion, are in 

 fact the inevitable products of the evolution of the human race from 

 barbarism to civilization, and have appeared in substantially the 

 same forms in so many ages and countries." (" Human Origins," 

 S. Laing, 1895, p. 131.) 



