THE CURSE OF THE SERPENT.
The curse pronounced upon the serpent was of a twofold character.
He was doomed to crawl upon his belly. How he traveled previous to that period we have no means of knowing, as revelation is silent on this momentous subject. He must have crawled on his back, or hopped on his head or tail,—either of which we should consider a much more difficult mode of traveling than that inflicted on him by the curse. I can see no curse or punishment in an animal or reptile traveling in its natural way, and by the easiest mode known in the whole animal kingdom. To make a curse of his mode of travel, he should have been turned the other side up, so that, while wiggling or wriggling along on his back, his eyes and mouth would get full of dust and mud. This would have been much more like a punishment,—a more real and sensible curse than his present mode of traveling.
The second mode of punishing the serpent was to compel him to eat dust as an article of diet; but some difficulty must have arisen in attempting to comply with the injunction. When the ground is saturated with water, he would have to take a meal occasionally of mud, which would not be more nutritious than dust, and would not be fulfilling the law. But it is needless to speculate. It is evident he does not subsist in that way, but, like the other culprits, escaped the penalties or punishments due to his crime.
I have now examined all the items of the curse—eight in number—said to have been visited upon Adam, Eve, and the serpent; and what do they all amount to? Not one of them has been realized as such; but most of those which were practically realized turned out to be real blessings. And yet they have been proclaimed to the world by the clergy as the missiles of wrath hurled upon a guilty world for the sin of rebellion against the divine government; and, whether any of these so-called "visitations of divine displeasure" were designed as penalties for disobedience or not, it is evident they have not in a moral sense been realized, or had any beneficial effect whatever. And we must conclude that it was rather short-sighted in Moses' God to attempt to bring his children into obedience by pronouncing curses upon them. He himself virtually acknowledges it; for, after having tried these expedients and found they availed nothing, he became so discouraged, that he said, "It grieved him to the heart" (see Gen. vi. 6) that he had made so rebellious a creature as man.