But whatever else the worst doctrine
of depravity may have been, it was a product of spiritual conviction; it
had nothing to do with remote physical origins. Men thought mankind
wicked because they felt wicked themselves. If a man feels wicked, I
cannot see why he should suddenly feel good because somebody tells him
that his ancestors once had tails. Man's primary purity and innocence
may have dropped off with his tail, for all anybody knows. The only
thing we all know about that primary purity and innocence is that we
have not got it. Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word,
more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the
vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as
the human sense of sin. By its nature the evidence of Eden is something
that one cannot find. By its nature the evidence of sin is something
that one cannot help finding.
Some statements I disagree with; others I do not understand. If a man
says, "I think the human race would be better if it abstained totally
from fermented liquor," I quite understand what he means, and how his
view could be defended. If a man says, "I wish to abolish beer because I
am a temperance man," his remark conveys no meaning to my mind.
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