08. THE SECOND CHAPTER OF GENESIS

SPIRITUALLY INTERPRETED.

FORMERLY OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD.

No. VI.

"The First Man knew Her not perfectly, no more shall the last God Her out. For Her thoughts are more than the sea, and Her counsels profounder than the great deep."—Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 28.

1863.

I am not ignorant," says St. Augustine,* "that the writers have said many things concerning

Paradise; but their opinions may be generally distested into three different classes. The first, those which maintain that Paradise should be understood in a material sense. The second, those which maintain that it should be understood only in a spiriative sense. The third, those which maintain that it should be understood in both senses, sometimes materially, sometimes spiritually."

Augustine adopts the third method; and in his comments directed against the Manichees, his langest is as follows:—

† the historical sense, facts are narrated; in the proseal, things future are foretold. Whosoever wishes to call parts of the narrative in the literal sense, or to stand them in no other than the direct meaning of the and in so doing can avoid blasphemies, and explain ings in accordance with the Catholic faith, such a one must not only regard with no disfavor, but esteem as the who best understands the subject, and as highly de-

* De Genesi ad literam, lib. iv.

† De Genesi contra Manichæos, lib. ii.

iv serving commendation. On the other hand, if in order to understand what is written, piously and worthily of God, we have no alternative but to believe the statements presented to us, in a figurative and enigmatical sense; then, as we possess Apostolic authority by which so many enigmas of the Old Testament have been solved, let us keep to the method we have set before us; that by the assistance of Him who has exhorted us to ask, to seek, and to knock, we may be enabled to explain all those figures of things in accordance with the Catholic faith, whether pertaining to history or prophecy: and this without prejudice to any better and more careful explanation, whether by ourself, or by any others to whom the Lord may vouchsafe to reveal it." It may be asked, then, what is the method adopted in our ensuing remarks? We answer, It is one which most resembles the third, or the one adopted by St Augustine. We interpret the narrative neither exclusively in a physical sense; nor, like Origen, exclusively in a spiritual sense; nor yet altogether like Augustine, who shifts the interpretation something from one to the other. Swedenborg maintains, there was really an earthly territory answering Eden and Paradise; rivers bounding that territory and human beings living in it and constituting Church. The narrative, therefore, is based upon historical fact; but its object is not to furnish a history of external historical facts, but of internal specific facts; in other words, the spiritual history of Church at that time. None but an inspired could ever attempt such a thing with regard to Church; for the true nature of the interior church the mind is that which, of himself, no human V could possibly know. Nevertheless, they are described to us in the Sacred Record, in order that we might know what the state of Adam primevally was, and so might judge of our present condition by comparing it with that of the primeval race in Paradise.

This knowledge is the more important, because, as Locke says:*—"It is obvious to any one who reads the New Testament, that the doctrine of redemption, and consequently of the Gospel, is founded upon the supposition of Adam's fall. To understand therefore what we are restored to by Jesus Christ, we must consider what the Scriptures shew we lost by Adam." To this end, it will be requisite to consider what Adam himself lost: thus what was signified by his being inspired with the breath of lives; by his being placed in Paradise; by his eating of the tree of lives, and giving names to every living creature. This inquiry is the more needed because of the tendencies of modern Theology.

"The new enquiries respecting the Antiquity of Man," says a modern writer,† "make some people tremble lest the story of Adam in Paradise should be shaken. My own anticipations from those enquiries are altogether hopeful. I know not in what they may issue. But while I have a strong conviction that whatever way the facts go, they will make that simple story more simple and more intelligible to us, and will strip it of a thousand wilful additions, I have a still stronger conviction, that we shall never really regard the Second Adam as Him by whom all things were created, and * Reasonableness of Christianity, p. 1.

† Claims of the Bible and of Science, p. 116. By the Rev. F. D. Maurice.

vi by whom all things consist—as the true Man, the actual image of the invisible God—till the first Adam occupies quite a different place in our divinity from that which he has occupied for several centuries."

After mentioning that the Old Testament speaks of the first Adam only once after his expulsion from Eden, and the New Testament only twice, it is added:—

"Turn to any book of systematic divinity, and you would suppose Adam's FALL was the subject of the Bible, the very ground of Law and Gospel. Surely such a divinity needs reformation. Thanks to the physical student, if, in anywise he helps the Reformation forward."

Another distinguished disciple of the same school of theology observes;*—

"All that we read of Adam and Eve in the Bible is, as we should expect, the history of children,—children in mind even when they were full grown in stature. Innocent as children, but like children, greedy, fanciful, ready to disobey at the first temptation, for the very silliest of reasons; and disobeying accordingly."

Our primeval ancestors are therefore described as weak, wilful, and ignorant, unable to take care of themselves, liable to be destroyed off the face of the earth, by their own folly, or even by the wild beasts around.

Such is the state attributed to our first parents in Paradise; but which belongs rather to our first parents out of Paradise; since it answers, for the most

* The Gospel of the Pentateuch, p. 38. By the Rev. C. Kingsley, F.L.S., F.G.S., etc.

vii part, to the state of Chaos out of which man was brought by those processes of creation and formation which constituted the six days' work of God.

If the state of our primeval ancestors in Paradise were such only as above described, it is obvious that they must have lost very little by the Fall; and for this simple reason, that they had not much to lose. In this case, undoubtedly the doctrine of the Fall would be comparatively of little importance; the position which it would occupy in any system of Theology which would give it eminence, would be altogether a false one: and such a Theology would indeed require a reformation. It is remarkable that the primeval history of man, as given by Swedenborg, comprises both the theory concerning the inferior origin of man, and the doctrine concerning his exalted condition in Paradise. In this point of view Science and Theology are not at variance with each other: the two are not inconsistent; and if they have been regarded as mutually antagonistic, it has been from the want of a principle of interpretation, which should be enabled to reconcile the one to the other.