THE BRUISED SERPENT “179 
the theologian to believe not only that the serpent 
of Paradise before its degradation walked erect on 
two legs, as the Fathers taught—some going so far 
as to give it a beautiful head as well as a ready 
tongue—but also that after the devil had cast aside 
the temporary coil something of his demoniac 
spirit remained thereafter in it, to be transmitted 
by inheritance, like a variation in structure or a 
new instinct, to its remotest descendants. There 
is the further objection, although not an important 
one, that it would be unjust to afflict the serpent 
so grievously for a crime of which it had only been 
made the involuntary agent. 
Believers in an instinct in man inimical to the 
serpent might still argue that the Scriptural curse 
only goes to show that this reptile was already held 
in general abhorrence—that, in fact, the feeling 
suggested the fable. That the fable had some such 
origin is probable, but we are just as far from an 
instinct as ever. The general feeling of mankind, 
or, at any rate, of the leading men during the 
earliest civilised periods of which we have any 
knowledge, was one of veneration, even of love, 
for the serpent. The Jews alone were placed by 
their monotheistic doctrine in direct antagonism to 
all nature-worship and idolatry. In their leaders 
—prophets and priests—the hatred of the heathen 
and of heathen modes of thought was kept alive, 
and constantly fanned into a fierce flame by the 
prevalent tendency in the common people to revert 
to the surrounding older and lower forms of religion, 
