4. Mama’s Nice Little Man

Any prudent parent knows that it is inadvisable to tell a toddling baby never to open the cellar door, which might result in his falling down the steep stairs and breaking his neck. It is much better to lock the door; for this youth was born with an inquisitive, if not skeptical, mind. If you can’t lock the door, at least you shouldn’t mention its possibilities; for the oncoming generation is naturally doubtful of the parental wisdom. Perhaps this is the way it was meant to be. If every generation had believed what its Papa and Mama believed, we would all be back in the tree-tops picking fleas off of one another.

But for some reason best known to Himself, the Creator warned Adam and Eve to keep away from a certain tree. They were to have the run of the whole garden; eat anything else that looked attractive—but in no circumstances were they to experiment with the fruit of this particular tree.

Of course there was only one way for that story to come out.

You could safely bet on that one. The record says that it was Eve who took the first nibble at the apple; and the minstrels who, for hundreds of years before any of this was put into writing, gallantly explained that a snake told her it was an exceptionally fine apple.

But, be all that as it may, the delicious fruit didn’t seem to bother Adam’s wife, so he too had a bite, and an Avenging Angel drove them both out of Eden and into the Jungle. This event, in terms of religious doctrine, was known as The Fall of Man.

Modern Science accounts for the human race in a slightly different way. Humanity, according to Biology, gradually evolved, through innumerable ages, from a low form of life. Man never fell from an original state of beauty, grace and glory. He has been struggling up, out of the sea, which he left as a courageous harbor seal, out of the forest where, for millions of years, he looked and acted like a monkey; after which a few of the boldest climbed down and fought it out with the saber-toothed tigers and the lumbering, all-but-brainless dinosaur. He made a stone axe, built a house, raised an altar, set up a government—and began to pay taxes.

Only a little while ago, comparatively, our grandfathers quarreled with one another over the relative truth of these two theories concerning man’s origin.

But in actual fact, there isn’t so much difference between these beliefs. Traditional Theology says that Man, after a brief sojourn in a beautiful garden, was pitched out into the brush to fend for himself. Modern Science says about the same thing of its primordial Man, omitting the legend concerning the garden. In short, the Adam of the Old Testament and the arbitrarily named “Anthropos” of the New Biology are blood brothers who have done (and some of whom are still doing) time in the Jungle. Ahead of them both lies a long, rough, uphill climb to higher ground. The New Biology, in its more optimistic moments, thinks that Humanity’s physical adjustment to its environment may be nearing the end of its mutations, and hints at another phase of our development; this time in the realm of the spiritual. The same prediction was made by the New Testament, where it says, “We are the Children of God; and, while it is not yet apparent what we may become, we know that when we meet Him, face to face, we shall find ourselves to resemble Him.”