(8) Religious Knowledge. Religious knowl edge and its appropriate habits also required an immediate transmission, and these are pre-emi nently comprehended in the 'image of God.' On the one hand, it is not to be supposed that the newly created man and his female companion were in spired with a very ample share of the doctrinal knowledge which was communicated to their pos terity by the successive and accumulating reve lations of more than four thousand years; and, on the other, that they were left by God in gross ignorance regarding the existence and excellencies of the Being who had made them, their obligations to him, and the way in which they might con tinue to receive the greatest blessings from him. It is self-evident that, to have attained such a kind and degree of knowledge, by spontaneous effort, under even the favorable circumstances of a state of negative innocence, would have been a long and arduous work. But the sacred nar rative leaves no room for doubt upon this head. In the primitive style it tells of God as speaking to them, commanding, instructing, assigning their work, pointing out their danger, and showing how to avoid it. All this, reduced to the dry sim plicity of detail, is equivalent to saying that the Creator, infinitely kind and condescending, by the use of forms and modes adapted to their ca pacity, fed their minds with truth, gave them a ready understanding of it and that delight in it which constituted holiness, taught them to hold intercourse with Himself by direct addresses in both praise and prayer, and gave some disclosures of a future state of blessedness when they should have fulfilled the conditions of their probation.
(9) Practical Habits. An especial instance of this instruction and information concerning prac tical habits is given to us in the narrative: Out of the ground Jehovah God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air [Hebr. of the heavens] ; and brought them unto the man [Hebr. the Adam], to see what he would call them' (Gen. ii :19). This, taken out of the style of condescend ing anthropomorphisin, amounts to such a state ment as the following: The Creator had not only formed man with organs of speech, but he taught him the use of them, by an immediate communi cation of the practical faculty and its accompany ing intelligence. He guided the man, as yet the solitary one of his species, to this among the first applications of speech, the designating of the ani mals with which he was connected, by appellative words which would both be the help of his mem ory and assist his mental operations, and thus would be introductory and facilitating to more enlarged applications of thought and language.
We are further warranted, by the recognized fact of the anecdotal and fragmentary structure of the Scripture history, to regard this as the se lected instance for exhibiting a whole kind or class of operations or processes ; implying that, in the same or similar manner, the first man was led to understand something of the qualities and rela tions of vegetables, earthy matters, the visible heavens, and the other external objects to which he had a relation.
(10) Creation of Woman. The next important article in this primeval history is the creation of the human female. It has been maintained that the Creator formed Adam to be a sole creature, in some mode of androgynous constitution capa ble of multiplying from his own organization without a conjugate partner. This notion was advanced by Jacob (or James) Bcehmen, the Si lesian 'Theosophist,' and one very similar to it has been recently promulgated by Baron Giraud (Philosophic Catholique de l'Histoire, Pa ris 1841), who supposes that the 'deep sleco' (Gen. ii :2t) was a moral fainting ('detaillance'), the first step in departing from God, the beginning of sin, and that Eve was its personified product by some sort of Divine concurrence or operation. To mention these vagaries is sufficient for their refutation. Their absurd and unscriptural charac ter is stamped on their front.
The second of the narratives is more circum stantial: 'And Jehovah God said, it is not good the man's being alone: I will make for him a help suitable for him.' Then follows the passage con cerning the review and the naming of the inferior animals; and it continues—`but for Adam he found not a help suitable for him. And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man [the Adam], and lie slept; and he took out one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh in its place; and Jehovah God built up the rib which he had taken from the man into a woman, and he brought her to the man, and the man said, this is now bone out of my bones, and flesh out of my flesh; this shall be called woman I ishah I. for this was taken from out of man lishr (Gen. 11:18-23).
This peculiar manner of the creation of the woman has, by some, been treated as merely a childish fable; by others,' as an allegorical fiction intended to represent the close relation of the female sex to the male, and the tender claims which women have to sympathy and love. That such was the intention we do not doubt; but why should that intention be founded upon a mythic allegory? Is it not taught much better, and im pressed much more forcibly, by its standing not on a fiction, but on a fact? We have seen that, under the simple archaic phrase that man was made of the 'dust of the ground,' is fairly to be understood the truth, which is verified by the analysis of modern chemistry; and, in the case of the woman, it is the same combination of ma terials, the same carbon, and hydrogen, and lime, and the rest; only that, in the first instance, those primordial substances are taken immediately, but in the second, mediately, having been brought into a state of organization.