Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/212

 solely on Him, evil is a contradiction, for God is certainly the absolute Good. An old pictorial representation of this, namely, the Fall, has been preserved in the Bible. This well-known account of how evil came into the world is in the form of a myth, and appears at the same time in the guise of a parable. Of course when a speculative idea, something true, is thus represented in a sensuous figure, in the form of something which has actually happened, it can hardly miss having certain traits about it which don’t fittingly express the truth itself. You find the same thing in Plato when he speaks in pictorial language of the Ideas, for there, too, the inadequacy of the picture to express the truth is apparent. This is how the narrative runs:—After the creation of Adam and Eve in Paradise, God forbade the first human beings to eat of a certain tree. The serpent, however, misleads them, and gets them to eat of it by saying, “You will become like God.” God then imposes a severe penalty on them, but at the same time says, “See, Adam is become as one of us, for he knows what is good and evil.” Looked at from this particular side, man, according to God’s declaration, has become God, but regarded from the other side, this means that God has cut off man’s chance of reaching Him by this path, inasmuch as He drives him out of Paradise. This simple story may, to begin with, be taken as embodying something like the following meaning. God laid down a command, and man, impelled by a boundless feeling of pride which led him to wish to be equal to God (a thought which came to him from the outside), transgresses this command, and for his miserable silly pride it was ordained that he should be severely punished. God laid down that command formally only, with the view of putting him in circumstances in which his obedience might be proved.

According to this explanation, everything takes place in accordance with the ordinary finite laws of cause and effect. God, undoubtedly, forbids evil, but such a