Editorial note — LESSON IX.

[Footnote A: We must not omit to notice the traces of these truths, which are found among many nations. The Greek legend of Pandora traces the entrance of evil to a woman; the Buddhist and Chinese traditions refer the beginning of sin to eating forbidden fruit and desiring forbidden knowledge; and most systems of mythology make the serpent a type of the power of evil, and a divine personage his destroyer. Delitzch well says, "The story of the Fall, like that of the Creation, has wandered over the world. Heathen nations have transplanted and mixed it up with their geography, their history, their mythology, although it has never so completely changed form, and color, and spirit, that you can not recognize it. Here, however, in the Law, it preserves the character of a universal, human, world-wide fact; and the groans of Creation, the Redemption that is in Christ Jesus, and the heart of every man, conspire in their testimony to the most literal truth of the narrative." The recollection of the tree of life is preserved in the sacred tree of the Assyrians and Hindoos, and in the other Eastern systems of mythology ("Old Testament History"—Wm. Smith—p. 29.)]