174 
The researches of science thus help to dispel the dreams of 
philosophy.* On the other hand, we find the truths of revela- 
tion confirmed on every side. The remembrance of the first 
home of the human race has imprinted itself too deeply in the 
language, the traditions, and the history of mankind to be 
easily eradicated, even by the crudities of Positivism, however 
all-potent these may seem for the moment. 
In the first place, the testimony of Scripture is very clear 
and precise. 
The religious history of man begins, then, in the embodying 
of what I have called the Ch urch idea in the introduction of our 
first parents, not into the wild world, but into a specially- 
selected garden. The Covenant name Jehovah Elohim specially 
marks out this account as the Church history in contrast with 
the more secular account in the first chapter of Genesis. Here, 
whilst abundantly supplied with all that was good and warned 
against evil, man was to have responded to the goodness 
of God, and to have learned how to name all God’s creatures, 
and to subdue them all to himself as the visible representative 
of Deity. He was to exercise to the full his faculties both of 
mind and body ; and evidently all this arrangement pointed to 
nothing less than his becoming king over all the earth. 
As the germ in the acorn is sheltered from all mischief and 
abundantly supplied with nourishment, so man was placed in 
those favourable circumstances which were essential to the 
first beginning of his life — a life which, when matured, was 
intended, like the oak, to dominate all the surroundings. 
These circumstances could only be found in the warmest 
and most favoured regions of the world, — such as the district 
of Babylonia, the exuberant fertility of which is celebrated by 
Herodotus. f He says that its soil was so well fitted to the 
growth of the cerealia, that it seldom produced less than two 
hundredfold, and in favourable seasons as much as three 
hundredfold. Xenophon adds, that the dates of Babylonia 
were so good, that what the Babylonians gave to their slaves 
were superior to those which found their way to Greece. 
Strabo states that Babylonia produced barley such as no other 
country did, and that the palm-tree afforded the people bread 
and honey, and wine and vinegar, and materials for wearing. 
In such a situation, and with a delightful climate, which con- 
tinued till the days of the Greek writers, was man first placed. 
Cyrus was in the habit of spending the seven colder months at 
Babylon because of the mildness of the climate. 
^ Spp glar\ A rmPTim y I) 
t Smith’s Did, of G. &E Geography , vol. i. p. 361; xi. 193. 
