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The Fundamentals sphere of science to contradict this. Personally, I do not know of any worthier conception than that which supposes God to have placed Himself in communication with man, in living relations with His moral creatures, from the very first. Cer- tainly there would be contradiction if Darwinian theory had its way and we had to conceive of man as a slow, gradual ascent from the bestial stage, but I am convinced, and have elsewhere sought to show, that genuine science teaches no such doctrine. Evolution is. not to be identified offhand with Darwifuamsm. Later evolutionaty'ltTCCTry~f fi'ay^rather^be de- scribed as a revolt against Darwinianism, and leaves the story open to a conception of man quite in harmony with that of the Bible. Of the fall, I have already said, that if the story of it were not in the Bible we should require to put it there for ourselves in order to explain the condition of the world as it is. On the question of patriarchial longevity, I would only say that there is here on the one hand the question of inter- pretation, for, as the most conservative theologians have come gradually to see, the names in these genealogies are not neces- sarily to be construed as only individuals. But I would add that I am not disposed to question the tradition of the extraor- dinary longevity in those olden times. Death, as I understand it, is not a necessary part of man’s lot at all. Had man not sinned, he would never have died. Death—t he separation of soul and body, the ¿wo integral parts of his nature—is some- thing for him abnormal, unnatural. I t is not strange, then, that in the earliest period life should have been much longer than it became afterward. Even a physiologist like Weiss- mann tells us that the problem for science today is—n ot why organisms live so long, but why they ever die. I have referred to Babylonian story of the flood, and can only add a word on the alleged contradiction of science on this subject. Very confident statements are often made as to the impossibility of such a submergence of the inhabited
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