STRATIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE 47 



altogether transcendental in its details, but told with a 

 lucidity of manner and a firmness of grasp of the entire 

 subject, which will command respect and faith till the end 

 of time. 



The first stratum of human story is conspicuous from 

 its containing the first example of divine command or 

 moral precept communicated to the human family in their 

 otherwise completely free and untrammelled enjoyment of 

 Edenic bliss in the form of a request, or demand, that 

 out of the entire available fruit production of the Garden 

 of Eden, of which they had been given possession, there 

 were two trees, the fruit of which they must not eat lest 

 punishment, also the first human punishment, should 

 follow. 



The command being disobeyed, the punishment surely 

 followed, and with one stroke of divine judgment and 

 justice it was realised that the human race had fallen from 

 the acme of purely biological bliss to which it had attained, 

 and had entered on the thorny path of securing its moral 

 salvation in "fear and trembling," "shaping its course" 

 along lines determined by amenability to moral law, and 

 responsible to divine decree. Thus man, from being the 

 highest form of animated being, with physical endowments 

 complete, now also gifted with intelligence and reasoning 

 powers, entered on the first stage of moral growth and 

 aspiration to accomplish the great process of ascension 

 from finished animality to perfect humanity, with its dis- 

 tinguishing characteristics of physical, mental, moral, and 

 spiritual qualities destined to raise coming humanity to 

 the highest attainable position open to created being, and 

 absolutely unattainable by even the most perfect amma hty. 



Thus the first stratum or layer of the higher develop- 

 ment or evolution of human destiny consists of the story 

 of man's fall from animal perfection, happiness, and bliss 

 and his call to cultivate the higher intellectual powers with 

 which he has become endowed, and to engraft and rear 

 on these the moral faculties, which had now begun 

 waken within him, in order that he should be able t< 

 enter on an ultra-animal or immaterial and altogetl 

 spiritual existence, in which his nature should be able to 

 live and progress to all eternity. Truly a profoundly 



