220 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



concerned with providing for more than the mer- 

 est needs and simple comforts of the body. Yet 

 the attainment of even this much often taxed their 

 utmost ingenuity. 



What was it, in fine, that the fall implied? 

 "The break-up of human beatitude," Father 

 Joseph Rickaby, S.J., answers, "the loss for 

 Adam and his posterity of sanctifying grace and 

 consequently of the entry into heaven and of the 

 Vision of God; the loss of immunity from con- 

 cupiscence, from sickness and from death; the loss 

 of a high knowledge of the things of God, of 

 familiarity with God, 'walking in Paradise at the 

 evening air,' seemingly in human form; a loss of 

 the ready obedience hitherto paid to man by the 

 lower animals; loss of that ready subsistence from 

 the fruits of the earth ever coming to hand with- 

 out toil." Coming then to describe, in fewest 

 words, the consequences that actually followed, 

 the same writer thus traces the course of history, 

 in full conformity with all that we know through 

 both scientific and documentary sources : 



The losses were all of privileges supernatural, not due to 

 human nature as such. Man's nature was left entire. But it 

 was left entire much in the way that a man, stripped of his 

 clothes, and suddenly turned out of a warm room into the 

 street, may be said still to have his entire nature. Human 

 nature, after the Fall, was left at a great disadvantage, moral 

 and physical. Man found himself in a novel situation for 

 which he was not destined and was quite unprepared. Morally 

 he had to struggle with the passions of his own nature, prone 

 to evil, physically he had to wrest a livelihood from external 



