He--did I say? Alas! I must say she likewise. The sacred story
is only too true to fact, when it represents the woman as falling,
not merely at the same time as the man, but before the man. Only
let us remember that it represents the woman as tempted; tempted,
seemingly, by a rational being, of lower race, and yet of superior
cunning; who must, therefore, have fallen before the woman. Who
or what the being was, who is called the Serpent in our
translation of Genesis, it is not for me to say. We have
absolutely, I think, no facts from which to judge; and Rabbinical
traditions need trouble no man much. But I fancy that a
missionary, preaching on this story to Negroes; telling them
plainly that the "Serpent" meant the first Obeah man; and then
comparing the experiences of that hapless pair in Eden, with their
own after certain orgies not yet extinct in Africa and elsewhere,
would be only too well understood: so well, indeed, that he might
run some risk of eating himself, not of the tree of life, but of
that of death. The sorcerer or sorceress tempting the woman; and
then the woman tempting the man; this seems to be, certainly among
savage peoples, and, alas! too often among civilised peoples also,
the usual course of the world-wide tragedy.

But--paradoxical as it may seem--the woman's yielding before the
man is not altogether to her dishonour, as those old monks used to
allege who hated, and too often tortured, the sex whom they could
not enjoy. It is not to the woman's dishonour, if she felt,
before her husband, higher aspirations than those after mere
animal pleasure. To be as gods, knowing good and evil, is a vain
and foolish, but not a base and brutal, wish. She proved herself
thereby--though at an awful cost--a woman, and not an animal. And
indeed the woman's more delicate organisation, her more vivid