244 EEY. JOHN TUCKWELL^ M.K.A.S._, ON AECH.EOLOGY AND 



experience of evil as well as good (Gen. ii, 17; iii, 6). Matter was 

 not, therefore, the source of contamination to the human race, but 

 is eternally pure and unpolluted, as the handiwork of God. Man 

 cannot shift on God the origin of the Fall, but to his own misuse of 

 what God had given him. To suppose that this important doctrine 

 was tacked on at the last moment to a religion which has subsisted 

 for countless generations, by an unknown writer, in days of depres- 

 sion and even despondency, can hardly be regarded as either 

 philosophical or probable. 



Mr. Maunder said: I should like to join with Chancellor 

 Lias in expressing the great pleasure with which I have listened to 

 Mr. Tuckwell's address. It has always seemed to me that if we but 

 read the books of Moses through, as we have them at the present 

 time, they bear upon their face the evident marks of unity of 

 purpose. Take for instance the book of Genesis, and look at it as 

 you would at any other piece of literature. It does not matter what 

 sources were used in the composition of the book, but its writer 

 from the beginning to the end works upon one clear, definite plan ; 

 and that plan finds its completion in the closing chapters of 

 Deuteronomy. There again in that book, if we simply read the 

 book as it stands, as Professor Moulton has shown us in his Modern 

 Reader's Bible, we find that book an essential unity ; four noble 

 orations, the one arising out of the other, lead up to the great 

 Song of Moses ; and orations, more eloquent, more masterly, do not 

 exist in any literature whatsoever. Looking at the question from 

 the point of view of literature alone, the books of Moses are 

 evidently the work of a single master mind. 



There is one trifling matter on which I diff'er from Mr. Tuckwell. 

 I do not think that the well-known Babylonian seal to which he 

 refers, "irresistibly points to the conclusion that the engraver was 

 familiar with some such story as that in Genesis iii." It is j^ossible 

 that the engraver was trying to show some such incident, but the 

 evidence is very slight. In all the many references to the seal which 

 I have come across, not one points out that the seal was engraved on 

 a cylinder, which necessarily has in itself no beginning nor end. 

 The serpent on the cylinder is not more behind the one figure than 

 the other. I have made a very rough little representation of the 

 cylinder, which I will hand round, and it is sufiicient to show that 

 we might begin the seal on either side of the supposed snake. It is 



