“Not at your Congregational platitudes,” he replied. “I was led to smile when I remembered how the colloquial Bible which was compiled by a Scotsman, treated that beautiful passage. He paraphrased it, 'The Lord went oot in the gloamin' to hae a crack wi' Adam ower the garden gate.'”
“I don't suppose he was thought irreverent,” said Dorothy. “He wasn't really, you know.”
“To take a step or two in the other direction,” said Mrs. Friswell; “I wonder if Milton had in his mind any of the Italian gardens he must have visited on his travels when he described the Garden of Eden.”
“There's not much of an Italian garden in Milton's Eden,” said Dorothy, who is something of an authority on these points. “But it is certainly an Italian twilight that he describes in one place. Poor Milton! he must have been living for many years in a perpetual twilight before 't darkened into his perpetual night.”
“You notice the influence of the hour,” said Heywood. “We have fallen into a twilight-shaded vale of converse. This is the hour when people talk in whispers in gardens like these.”
“I dare say we have all done so in our time,” remarked some one with a sentimental sigh that she tried in vain to smother.
“Ah, God knew what He was about when He put a man and a woman into a garden alone, and gave them an admonition,” said Friswell. “By the way, one of the most remarkable bits of testimony to the scientific accuracy of the Book of Genesis, seems to me to be the discovery, after many years of conjecture and vague theorising, that man and woman were originally one, so that the story of the formation of Eve by separating from Adam a portion of his body is scientifically true. I don't suppose that any of you good orthodox folk will take that in; but it is a fact all the same.”
“I will believe anything except a scientific fact,” said Dorothy.
“And I will believe nothing else,” said Friswell. “The history of mankind begins with the creation of Eve—the separation of the two-sexed animal into two—meant a new world, a world worth writing about—a world of love.”
“Listen to him—there's the effect of twilight in a Garden of Peace for you,” said I. “Science and the Book of Genesis, hitherto at enmity, are at last reconciled by Atheist Friswell. What a triumph! What a pity that Milton, who made his Archangel visit Adam and his bride and give them a scientific lecture, did not live to learn all this!”