the pope the front door of the Protestant church in Madrid must be kept closed, and worshipers must enter by the side door. Colporteurs selling the Bible and other Protestant books are frequently imprisoned and their books burned. A federal republic with absolute liberty of conscience, freedom of worship, and separation of Church and State is the hope of Spain's future. Dr. Zimmermann's interesting and instructive book is fully illustrated with full-page half-tone illustrations reproduced from photographs of palaces, cathedrals, cities, and Spanish scenes.

Studies in the Apostolic Church. By CHARLES HERBERT MORGAN, THOMAS EDDY TAYLOR, and S. EARL TAYLOR. 8vo, pp. 226. New York: Eaton & Mains. Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye. Price, 75 cents, postpaid; in lots of ten or more to one address, 50 cents each, carriage extra.

While the text-books, of which this is the second, are prepared primarily for the Bible Study course in the Epworth League and Christian Endeavor Societies, they are so acceptable to the general Church that twenty-five thousand copies of the first book, Studies in the Life of Christ, have been sold in the eighteen months since its issue, while there are only about fifteen thousand members of the classes that have used it. This second book, which covers the entire material of the Acts, Epistles, and Revelation in thirty-five Studies, will prove of special value to the minister, as bringing together in brief space the conclusions of the latest literature bearing on this New Testament field, such as Hastings's Dictionary, the nine compact little volumes of the New-Century Bible by as many eminent scholars relating to this part of the Bible, Richard Belward Rackham's remarkable work on The Acts of the Apostles, in the new series of Oxford commentaries, besides about twenty-five other foremost volumes, all of which are referred to by exact pages as they relate to the Studies and the three hundred topics assigned for investigation. This feature has already been strongly commended by Principal A. P. McDiarmid, of Brandon College, who has tested the book in his class work, and others. The work will evidently have large usefulness.

METHODIST REVIEW.

JULY, 1903.

ART. I.-THE BIBLE STORY OF THE FALL.

It is practically the universal judgment of modern scholarship that Genesis iii is a unity which reaches us, with the possible exception of one or two phrases, from the hand of one writer, and that it belongs to the oldest groundwork of Hebrew literature. No analysis of documents, therefore, or discussion of age is necessary. The meaning of the Hebrew words used is also undisputed, so that no verbal criticism seems called for.

A few preliminary remarks, however, may clear the way to a quicker choice between the various interpretations given of this narrative. In the first place, recent archæological discoveries either rule out of consideration or throw a heavy burden of proof upon several of the old derogatory interpretations. It is no longer possible to think of the Hebrew author or compiler of this Genesis narrative as being a primitive man. He lived at the end, not at the beginning, of the ages. His type of thought and his view-point are not to be reached by a psychological study of such specimens of later humanity as have been so attractive to Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock, but rather by an examination of the views of his neighbors living in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt at that time and by a study of his own racial and national development. I have recently described elsewhere the early intercourse between the Hebrews and other ancient peoples, showing that from the earliest his

*

toric times Palestine had been peculiarly influenced by other nations, being the meeting place of the culture of the entire ancient world. There is no proof that this intercourse ceased when the Hebrews entered the land. If their recorded memories can be trusted at all, the ancestors of this people had been men of property, accustomed to live in cities; men who bought graves, and homes, and who had such leadership that they could actually conquer a home in Palestine for themselves from such mighty antagonists as we now know the Hittites and Moabites to have been, quickly found a monarchy there which commanded notice and respect immediately among foreign nations, and speedily originate a literature which even to this day is stirring the whole civilized world to admiration. If the Hebrews were at any historic period less civilized than their neighbors it becomes quite a task to explain why the best laws, the best religious faiths, and the best literary productions that have come down to us have come from the least civilized of all those ancient peoples. It is now seen by all archæologists that the great original works which formed the basis of the Pentateuch and the early prophecies are not copies, or even imitations, of the literary forms or contents with which the Israelites were or had been surrounded. There is an individuality about these as marked as in any nation, at any era. And it is a surprising thing that the very first scrap of prophetic literature that comes to us comes not from the hand of a professional scribe, living in the capital, but from a rustic, living in a little country village; and yet this is written in elegant Hebrew, showing a remarkable acquaintance with the international complications, religious ideas, and habits of thought among the neighboring nations, and takes for granted a well-established conception of national history and a well-formed body of religious and moral principles. That Amos was such as he was proves that anterior to Amos there were religious culture, law, centuries of training, settled customs, and a The Homiletic Review, August, 1901; August, 1902.

reading public. His views of God and of his moral government, his ethical system, as well as his acquaintance with the past history of his own and neighboring countries-with which he takes it for granted that his hearers are also acquainted-all point to Amos as at the culmination of a national civilization and not at its genesis. This can be said with equal assurance of the author of this chapter (Gen. iii). If there is a basis of ancient myth utilized in this narrative, as Gunkel seems to have abundantly proved, it has nevertheless been worked over and moralized upon until it has been completely transformed from its original purpose and meaning.

This narrative did not arise in the culture period of mythical creations. A myth ceases to be a myth when worked over for pedagogical purposes-otherwise this objectionable word could be applied to various chapters of New Testament apocalypse as truly as to these early chapters of the Old Testament. I object to the word, in this connection, not only because in the common thought it is synonymous with something false, but because it is not in accordance with the Hebrew spirit. While the natural and supernatural were never well distinguished by the Hebrews, yet from everything which they have written we can conclude that they never personalized the elements as did other nations. Their monotheistic faith, which appears with them when we first see them, was totally antagonistic to such myths. Indeed, as Gunkel well points out, man had not only ceased to be a myth maker, but had long ceased to be a nomad and had become a tiller of the soil, and several of the pains of civilization had come upon the race, before this narrative could have been originated or adopted by the Hebrews. Even Gunkel has not drawn out this argument sufficiently. From this narrative itself it is evident that when it became a part and parcel of the accepted Hebrew tradition that people must not only have been monotheistic but monogamous, and so far advanced in civilization that the man, not the woman, is thought of as the tiller of the

soil. Anyone acquainted with primitive oriental life will perceive the significance of this suggestion.

Therefore, while there may have been an original myth, now lost, in the hands of this Bible writer, yet, if so, because of his deep meditation and reflection, and his thoroughly Hebrew monotheistic spirit, he has completely transformed it from its original purpose and used it merely as illustrative material; just as the writer of the first chapter makes vivid his narrative by a side look at Tiamat as chaos and Job glorifies the almighty Jehovah by making him the real and easy conqueror of the ancient dragon with whom Marduk struggled so fiercely.

The second preliminary observation has to do with the style of this narrative. I think it is Shailer Mathews who has remarked that the modern Palestinians talk in tropes. That is no truer of them than of their more ancient relatives. The most ancient speech of man was undoubtedly a picture language. Every oriental language has an alphabet or syllabary composed of pictures. When illuminated and interpreted by the oriental imagination, the house, the camel, the girdle, a row of temple columns, wings and horns and coiling snakes all received a new and lofty meaning. As Detzel has said, "Man can only think of God and the highest spiritual realities in pictures." This is true of deeply spiritual or poetical natures in every age. Birds and animals, rivers and seas, appear everywhere in Dante and Goethe, in Carlyle and Tennyson, in this symbolic sense. So the beasts and reptiles on the earth, and the stars and planets in the sky, all spoke to the ancients of mysterious spiritual truths. Every ancient sanctuary was a moral picture lesson to all who saw it. It is now known that these sanctuaries were so similar in Palestine, Egypt, and Babylonia-as also the symbolic colors and dress and ritual-that all oriental strangers visiting Jerusalem could have been able to read much of the religion of Jehovah simply from this picture lesson in stone. It need not surprise anyone, therefore, to find that the picture story of the fall of man finds