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of Christ. Listen: If by the trespass of the one, death reigned through the one, much more shall they who receive the abundance of the grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ (Rom. v. 12-21). God grant that all of us may wash our robes in the blood of the Lamb, and so have right to the Tree of Life, and enter in through the gates into the city (Rev. xxii. 14)!

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

LECTURE XII.

GENESIS OF WOMAN.

"And the Lord God said: It is not good that the man should be alone: I will make him an help meet for him. And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God hath taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said: This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh. And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."-GENESIS ii. 18-25.

FIRST of all, let us, as is our wont, I.-Explanation attend to the Explanation of the Pas

of the Passage.

sage. For a remarkable story it is, and

in an eminent sense it needs explanation.

an Inspired Parable.

At the very outset, then, let me say 1.-Our Passage that, for reasons indicated in our Introductory Study, I believe that this record of the Genesis of Woman is a Divine Parable. Of course, it is possible that the record is to be taken literally. Of

course, it is possible that Almighty God, for Whom nothing is too hard (Gen. xviii. 4), except to do wrong, could have performed on Adam in Eden a surgical operation, administering to him an anæsthetic (for it is scarcely conceivable that a loving God would have inflicted on a sinless Man in Paradise the pain of a bodily injury without the soothing of an anodyne), taking out of the slumberer one of his ribs, stanching the crimson flow, healing the wound, turning the rib into a Woman. Of course, the Maker of heaven and earth, had He so chosen, could have done this, and many another even more incredible thing. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that to take the story thus literally is not only to isolate it from other scenes of the Creative Week, which we are compelled, for reasons repeatedly assigned, to regard as panoramic; it is also to degrade a solemn, profound Parable into a grotesque, ridiculous affair, worthy to take its place, not with the august revelations of the Infinite One, but with the cunningly-devised fables of heathen legends, as, e. g., the birth of panoplied Athena from the cloven brow of Zeus. Remember, as I have often reminded you, that in this matter of the Creative Week we are moving in a region of incomparable Truths, altogether transcending human experience. The language, then, must, in the very nature of the case, be figurative, giving us the truth not so much in literal details as in shadowy outlines, colossal hints, stupendous flitting vistas. No, friends, the Story of the Genesis of Woman is a Divine Parable. Being a Divine Parable, it has been written for our instruction, upon whom the ends of the world are come (1 Cor. x. 11). May God help us to catch the true, momentous meaning!

2. - Panorama of Emergent Woman.

Let us, then, again ascend the Mount of Panoramic Vision, and survey with the inspired Seer the unfolding scene of

want.

Emergent Woman. It is still the Sixth Day. Eden, in all its ravishing beauty, lies before us. Adam, fresh from the hands of his Maker, respirant with His inbreathing (Gen. ii. 7), radiant with His Image (Gen. i. 26), walks before us lord of all. And yet, in spite of the Edenic perfections, he is ill at ease. There is, somehow, the sense of an indefinable And now his Maker would teach him the secret of his disquietude. Accordingly, He summons before the Man the various forms of animal life, that Adam may catch a glimpse of what is meant by Society. And so every beast of the field and every bird of the air comes trooping to Adam, and he gives to each its name. The vision of this moving, sentient, abounding life awakens the latent capacity for companionship. But, amid all these varieties of animal life, he finds no true companion, no help meet, no mate suited to him. And now, wearied with his work of naming the animal creation, and still disquieted by the sense of defect, he lies down on the rich, odorous sward, it may be in the shadow of the Tree of Life, and falls into a profound slumber. It is the golden hour for Divine instruction; for it is in dreams, in visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, that God openeth their ear, and sealeth up their instruction (Job xxxiii. 15, 16). Wrapped in his deep sleep, Eden's dreamer beholds the vision of his Second Self. He sees his Maker taking from out of him one of his own ribs, forming it into a Woman, and presenting her in all her glorious beauty to himself, to be to him henceforth that blessed mate for whom he has unconsciously sighed. And so his God has in very truth given to His beloved in his sleep (Psalm cxxvii. 2). Nor is it altogether a dream. Awaking from his sleep, he beholds still standing by him the fair, blissful vision. Instinctively recognizing the community of nature, he joyously ex

claims: "This, now, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this shall be called Woman, Isha, because from Man, Ish, was she taken." And hand in hand they stroll raimentless-the Man and his Wife-and are not ashamed. And so falls the curtain on the final scene of the drama of the Sixth Day. Such is the Vision of Emergent Woman. And now let us attend to some of the lessons of the Vision.

II.-Moral Meaning of the Vision.

1. The Essential

Woman.

(a.)-Woman's Formal Inferiority to Man.

And, first: The Essential Unity of

Unity of Man and Man and Woman: "This, now, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this shall be called Woman, because from Man was she taken." But here, at the very outset, let me call your attention to a significant fact. If the Parable of Eden is true, Woman is inferior to Man. I am aware that I am entering on a debated, troublesome question. But I have undertaken to expound the Story of the Creative Week. I wish to do my task honestly, and, so far as may be, thoroughly, fairly meeting every question fairly raised. And our Passage does fairly raise the question of Woman's relation to Man in the matter of authority. The Woman was not created alongside with the Man; the Woman was taken out of the Man. And millenniums afterward, in full blaze of Him Who, as born of Woman, is the Light of men, His Apostle Paul reaffirms the ancient Archive: "The Man is not from the Woman, but the Woman from the Man; neither was the Man for the sake of the Woman, but the Woman was for the sake of the Man (1 Cor. xi. 8, 9) ; for Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Tim. ii. 13). And upon this fact the Apostle, throughout his Letters, bases his doctrine of Woman's subordination to Man. But what are we to learn from these deliverances of Holy Writ

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