OUR FIRST PARENTS 221 



nature, and defend himself from manifold dangers of death. 

 In both struggles Adam's posterity was overborne. [This does 

 not imply a want of the necessary Divine assistance for each 

 individual soul, in whatever stage of civilization, to save itself, 

 if so it wished. They were overborne, but through their own 

 fault.] They sinned as their first parents had sinned, and 

 the wickednesses of men were multiplied upon the earth. 1 Much 

 of this wickedness was probably merely "natural," and ex-. 

 cusable on the ground of ignorance; not a little was "formal" 

 and culpable. St. Paul speaks with horror of the condition 

 of the pre-Christian world.* Physically, as Adam's children 

 multiplied upon the earth, the overplus of the population was 

 thrust out into the ruder and less favored climates, food was 

 hard to get, savage animals were many, and, naturally enough, 

 man became savage as well as his surroundings. 8 



Here then is a picture that accounts, scientifi- 

 cally no less than religiously, for the facts that 

 paleontology, archeology and history teach us. 



Pastoral and agricultural occupations, as econo- 

 mists state and history exemplifies, would in the 

 course of time engage the first attention of primi- 

 tive man. Obviously it could not have been long 

 before Adam and Eve would have attempted these 

 forms of more permanently providing for them- 

 selves and their offspring, perhaps after their 

 first severe struggles with nature. Their 

 power over the animal world which they had once 

 possessed, and the Divine injunction, even in 

 "the paradise of pleasure," to busy themselves 

 enjoyably in it, "to dress it, and to keep it," nat- 



^en., vi:s. 



a Rom., I, ii, iii. Eph., ii. 



*"The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius." 



