That this catastrophe was indeed THE FALL OF MAN.
Think what a fall!
From comfort to misery; from plowed fields to the
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thistles and the stones; from sunny and glorious days in a stormless land to the awful trials of the Drift Age; the rains, the cold, the snow, the ice, the incessant tempests, the darkness, the poverty, the coats of hides, the cave-life, the cannibalism, the Stone Age.
Here was a fall indeed.
There is nothing in antiquity that has not a meaning. The very fables of the world's childhood should be sacred from our laughter.
Our theology, even where science has most ridiculed it, is based on a great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat--all, all, are literal facts.
And could we but penetrate their meaning, the trees of life and knowledge and the apples of paradise probably represent likewise great and important facts or events in the history of our race.
And with what slow steps did mankind struggle upward! In some favored geographical center they recovered the arts of metallurgy, the domestication of animals, and the alphabet.