SURGE [to Franklyn] I wish you would, you know.  It’s important.  Very important.

FRANKLYN.  Well, consider it this way.  It is clear that when Adam and Eve were immortal it was necessary that they should make the earth an extremely comfortable place to live in.

BURGE.  True.  If you take a house on a ninety-nine years lease, you spend a good deal of money on it.  If you take it for three months you generally have a bill for dilapidations to pay at the end of them.

FRANKLYN.  Just so.  Consequently, when Adam had the Garden of Eden on a lease for ever, he took care to make it what the house agents call a highly desirable country residence.  But the moment he invented death, and became a tenant for life only, the place was no longer worth the trouble.  It was then that he let the thistles grow.  Life was so short that it was no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well.

BURGE.  Do you think that is enough to constitute what an average elector would consider a Fall?  Is it tragic enough?

FRANKLYN.  That is only the first step of the Fall.  Adam did not fall down that step only:  he fell down a whole flight.  For instance, before he invented birth he dared not have lost his temper; for if he had killed Eve he would have been lonely and barren to all eternity.  But when he invented birth, and anyone who was killed could be replaced, he could afford to let himself go.  He undoubtedly invented wife-beating; and that was another step down.  One of his sons invented meat-eating.  The other was horrified at the innovation.  With the ferocity which is still characteristic of bulls and other vegetarians, he slew his beefsteak-eating brother, and thus invented murder.  That was a very steep step.  It was so exciting that all the others began to kill one another for sport, and thus invented war, the steepest step of all.  They even took to killing animals as a means of killing time, and then, of course, ate them to save the long and difficult labor of agriculture.  I ask you to contemplate our fathers as they came crashing down all the steps of this Jacob’s ladder that reached from paradise to a hell on earth in which they had multiplied the chances of death from violence, accident, and disease until they could hardly count on three score and ten years of life, much less the thousand that Adam had been ready to face!  With that picture before you, will you now ask me where was the Fall?  You might as well stand at the foot of Snowdon and ask me where is the mountain.  The very children see it so plainly that they compress its history into a two line epic: 

    Old Daddy Long Legs wouldn’t say his prayers: 
    Take him by the hind legs and throw him downstairs.

LUBIN [still immovably sceptical] And what does Science say to this fairy tale, Doctor Barnabas?  Surely Science knows nothing of Genesis, or of Adam and Eve.

CONRAD.  Then it isnt Science:  thats all.  Science has to account for everything; and everything includes the Bible.