or if, like some of the Fathers of the church such as Origen, we take it
as an allegory, the result is the same--that Death is not in the essence
of man's creation, but supervened as the consequence of an inverted mode
of thinking. The Creative Spirit thought one way, and Eve thought
another; and since the Thought of the Creating Spirit is the origin of
Life, this difference of opinion naturally resulted in death. Then, from
this starting-point, all the rest of the Bible is devoted to getting rid
of this difference of opinion between us and the Spirit of Life, and
showing us that the Spirit's opinion is truer than ours, and so leading
us to adopt it as our own. The whole thing turns on the obvious
proposition, that if you invert the cause you also invert the effect. It
is the principle that division is the inversion of multiplication, so
that if 2 × 2 = 4 then you cannot escape from the consequence that 4/2 =
2. The question then is, which of the two opinions is the more
reasonable--that death is essentially inherent in the nature of things,
or that it is not?

Probably ninety-nine out of a hundred readers will say, the whole
experience of mankind from the earliest ages proves that Death is the
unchangeable Law of the Universe, and there have been no exceptions. I
am not quite sure that I should altogether agree with them on this last
point; but putting that aside, let us consider whether it really is the
essential Law of the Universe. To say that this is proved by the past
experience of the race, is what logicians call a _petitio principii_--it
is assuming the whole point at issue. It is the same argument which our
grandfathers would have used against aerial navigation--no one had ever
travelled in the air, and that proved that no one ever could. My father,
who was a junior officer in India when the first railway was run in
England, used to tell a story of one of his senior officers, who, on
being asked what he thought of the rapidity of the new mode of