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 emotions, her more voluble fancy, as well as her mere physical
weakness and weariness, have been to her, in all ages, a special source
of temptation which it is to her honour that she has resisted so much
better than the physically stronger, and therefore more culpable, man.

As for what the tree of knowledge was, there really is no need for us to