48 METAPHYSICS 



marvellous story, alive with the greatest of human interests 

 and provocative of thought at once overpowering in its 

 retrospective and prospective ranges of application. 



Indeed, it may be said that the fall left man bereft 

 of his former immediate dependence upon extraneous or 

 non-personal aid in supplying his daily material wants, 

 which henceforth must be obtained "in the sweat of his 

 brow," and thereby was laid the foundation of the future 

 great economic edifice of "trade and commerce," which 

 have now for so long exercised the wits and energies of 

 mankind. 



The early attempts of the human species to cultivate the 

 moral character and faculties and to raise that species into 

 the position of moral eminence and supremacy to which 

 its super-animal qualities entitled and qualified it to occupy, 

 turned out, to a great extent, failures, even under the 

 immediate inspiration of divine influences favourable to 

 moral growth, and when the attempts were attended by 

 comparative success, these attempts died out and their 

 inevitable results were almost complete failures and lapses 

 into the still strongly surviving conditions and seductions 

 of animality. In this condition of moral blight and 

 failure were passed the long ante-diluvian ages until the 

 cup of animality was full and running over, humanity 

 lying prone, intoxicated, and helpless amid the pestilent 

 influences, absolutely overpowering and benumbing, to 

 which it was exposed continually and from every direction, 

 until a climax was reached, when the whole human family 

 was annihilated together with its animal neighbours, with 

 the exception of a reserved remnant to restart the great 

 problems of post-diluvian human progress and destiny. 

 How could such stories as these, embracing incalculable 

 periods of time and countless human vicissitudes and 

 experiences, be told otherwise than in essence ? the essence 

 squeezed, so to speak, into almost homogeneous texture, 

 in which traces of stratification alone survive to mark the 

 long separated episodes of the earliest stages of human 

 progress and events, as the long period of human history 

 reaching from Adam to Noah, as alone fully recorded in 

 the book of Genesis, in the tersest yet amplest manner, 

 so abundantly testifies and illustrates. 



