“And so,” he went on, “we have those reflections of the communal mortal mind which we call the Israelites recording their thoughts and ideas. Sometimes they recorded plain fact; sometimes they wrapped their moral teachings in allegories and fables. Josephus says of Moses that he wrote some things enigmatically, some allegorically, and the rest in plain words, since in his account of the first chapter of Genesis and the first three verses of the second he gives no hint of any mystery at all. But when he comes to the fourth verse of the second chapter he says Moses, after the seventh day was over, began 101 to talk philosophically, and so he understood the rest of the second and third chapters in some enigmatical and allegorical sense. Quite so, it appears to me, for the writer, whoever he was, was then attempting the impossible task of explaining the enigma of evil, the origin of which is associated always with the dust-man.”
“You deny the truth of the account of the creation as given in the second chapter of Genesis, do you?” asked Reverend Moore. “You deny that man was tempted and fell?”
“Well,” said Hitt, smiling, “of course there is no special reason for denying that serpents may have talked, millions and millions of years ago. In fact, they still have rudimentary organs of speech––as do most animals. Perhaps they all talked at one time. Snakes developed in the Silurian Era, some twenty million years ago. In the vast intervening stretch of time they may have lost their power to talk. But, as for the second chapter of Genesis, Moses may or may not have written it. Indeed, he may not have written the first. We do not know. The book of Genesis shows plainly that it is a composite of several books by various authors. I incline to the belief that some more materialistic hand and mind than Moses’s composed that second chapter. However that may be, it is a splendid example of the human mind’s crude attempt to interpret the spiritual creation in its own material terms. It in a way represents the dawning upon the human mind of the idea of the spiritual creation. For when finite sense approaches the infinite it must inevitably run into difficulties with which it can not cope; it must meet problems which it can not solve, owing to its lack of a knowledge of the infinite principle involved. That’s why the world rejected the first account of the creation and accepted the second, snake-story, dust-man, apple tree, and all.”
“Hitt!” exclaimed Haynerd, his eyes wide agape. “You’re like a story-book! Go on!”
“Wait!” interrupted Miss Wall. “We know that man appeared on this earth in comparatively recent times. For millions and millions of years before he was evolved animals and vegetables had been dying. Now was their death due to sin? If so, whose?”
“Assuredly,” returned Hitt. “Your difficulty arises from the fact that we are accustomed to associate sin with human personality. But remember, the physical universe has been evolved from the communal mortal mind. It represents ‘negative truth.’ It has been dying from the very beginning of its seeming existence, for its seeming existence alone is sin. The vegetables, the animals, and now the men, that have been evolved from it, and that express it and reflect and manifest 102 it, must die, necessarily, because the so-called mind from which they evolve is not based upon the eternal, immortal principle, God. And so it and they miss the mark, and always have done so. You must cease to say, Whose sin? Remember that the sin is inherent in the so-called mind that is expressed by things material. The absence of the principle which is God is sin, according to the Aramaic word, translated ‘hamartio,’ which Jesus used. The most lowly cell that swam in the primeval seas manifested the communal mortal mind’s sin, and died as a consequence.”
“In other words, it manifested a supposition, as opposed to truth?”
“Its existence was quite suppositional,” replied Hitt. “It did not manifest life, but a material sense of existence. The subjective always determines the objective. And so the communal mortal mind, so-called, determined these first lowly material and objective forms of existence. They were its phenomena, and they manifested it. Different types now manifest it, after long ages. But all are equally without basis of principle, all are subject to the mortal law that everything material contains within itself the elements for its own destruction, and all must pass away. In our day we are dealing with the highest type of mortal mind so far evolved, the human man. He, too, knows but one life, human life, the mortal-mind sense of existence. His human life is demonstrably only a series of states of material consciousness, states of thought-activity. The classification and placing of these states of consciousness give him his sense of time. The positing of his mental concepts give him his sense of space. His consciousness is a thought-activity, externalizing human opinions, ideas, and beliefs, not based on truth. This consciousness––or supposititious human mind––is very finite in nature, and so is essentially self-centered. It attributes its fleshly existence to material things. It believes that its life depends upon its fleshly body; and so it thinks itself in constant peril of losing it. It goes further, and believes that there are multitudes of other human minds, each having its own human, fleshly existence, or life, and each capable of doing it and one another mortal injury. It believes that it can be deprived by its neighboring mortal minds of all that it needs for its sustenance, and that it can improve its own status at their expense, and vice versa. It is filled with fears––not knowing that God is infinite good––and its fears become externalized as disaster, loss, calamity, disease, and death at last. Perhaps its chief characteristic is mutability. It has no basis of principle to rest upon, and so it constantly shifts and changes to accord with its own shifting thought. There is 103 nothing certain about it. It is here to-day, and gone to-morrow.”
“Pretty dismal state of affairs!” Haynerd was heard to mutter.
“Well, Ned,” said Hitt, “there is this hope: human consciousness always refers its states to something. And that ‘something’ is real. It is infinite mind, God, and its infinite manifestation. The human mind still translates or interprets God’s greatest idea, Man, as ‘a suffering, sinning, troubled creature,’ forgetting that this creature is only a mental concept, and that the human mind is looking only at its own thoughts, and that these thoughts are counterfeits of God’s real thoughts.