of a Redeemer who should hereafter assume their nature and deliver from death and sin—of a Divine Wisdom which was with God from the beginning, and of an Evil One, who, having fallen from his throne in heaven, had now become an antagonistic power, tempting men to their destruction.[1]
Its character.Whether these early chapters may contain this theological scheme by just and legitimate inference, is a question with which we are not here concerned. It is not a question of doctrine or belief or theological analysis. It is a simple question of fact which must determine whether various races of mankind were or were not guilty of wilful perversion of high and mysterious doctrines. Taken wholly by themselves, and not interpreted by the light thrown on them by the thought and belief of later ages, these records tell us of man as being (in some sense not explicitly defined) made in the Divine image and likeness—of one positive prohibition, the violation of which was to be followed by immediate death—of a subtle beast which tempts the woman to disobey the command, and of a sense of shame which follows the transgression. They tell us of flight and hiding when the man hears the voice of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day—of an attempt to transfer the blame from the man to the woman, from the woman to the serpent—of a sentence of humiliation passed upon the latter, with the warning that its head should be bruised by the woman's seed—of a life of toil and labour for the former, ending with a return to the dust from which he had been made. Besides this, they tell us briefly that after some generations men began to call upon the name of the Lord; that in the course of time they sank (with but one exception) into brute lust and violence; and that on the renovation of the earth men were made answerable for each other's blood, and received the token of the rainbow as a warrant for the future permanence of the course of nature. But of any revelation before the fall, beyond a command to till the garden and to abstain from the fruit of a particular tree, these records give not the slightest indication.
Limits of that evidence.If the doctrines which are thus supposed to have made up the primitive revelation are contained in these chapters, they are so, it is admitted, by a dim and feeble foreshadowing.[2] They tell us nothing of God in the perfection of His nature, or of a Unity of Three Persons in the Godhead. They tell us of a subtle serpent, not of a fallen angel, of the seed of the woman as bruising that serpent's head, not of a Divine Redeemer delivering from sin and spiritual death. Still less do they tell us of a Divine Wisdom, of an institution of