Thus: 

   “’Twas the morning of time
    When yet naught was,
    Nor sand nor sea was there,
    Nor cooling streams. 
    Earth was not formed
    Nor heaven above. 
    A yawning gap was there
    And grass nowhere.”

Not unlike these conceptions of the “Beginning” is that which Morenhout found in a song of the Tahitans, and which ran thus: 

   “He was; Toaroa was his name,
    He existed in space; no earth, no heaven, no men.”

M. Goussin adds the further translation:  “Toaroa, the Great Orderer, is the origin of the earth:  he has no father, no posterity."[171] The tradition of the Odshis, a negro tribe on the African Gold Coast, represents the creation as having been completed in six days.  God created first the woman; then the man; then the animals; then the trees and plants; and lastly the rocks.  God created nothing on the seventh day.  He only gave men His commandments.  The reversal of the order here only confirms the supposition that it is an original tradition.  We find everywhere on the Western Hemisphere, north and south, plain recognition of the creation of the world by one Supreme God, though the order is not given.  How shall we account for the similarities above indicated, except on the supposition of a common and a very ancient source?

Still more striking are the various traditions of the Fall of man by sin.  In the British Museum there is a very old Babylonian seal which bears the figures of a man and a woman stretching out their hands toward a fruit-tree, while behind the woman lurks a serpent.  A fragment bearing an inscription represents a tree of life as guarded on all sides by a sword.  Another inscription describes a delectable region surrounded by four rivers.  Professors Rawlinson and Delitzsch both regard this as a reference to the Garden of Eden.

“The Hindu legends,” says Hardwick, “are agreed in representing man as one of the last products of creative wisdom, as the master-work of God; and also in extolling the first race of men as pure and upright, innocent and happy.  The beings who were thus created by Brahma are all said to have been endowed with righteousness and perfect faith; they abode wherever they pleased, unchecked by any impediment; their hearts were free from guile; they were pure, made free from toil by observance of sacred institutes.  In their sanctified minds Hari dwelt; and they were filled with perfect wisdom by which they contemplated the glory of Vishnu.

“The first men were, accordingly, the best.  The Krita age, the ’age of truth,’ the reign of purity, in which mankind, as it came forth from the Creator, was not divided into numerous conflicting orders, and in which the different faculties of man all worked harmoniously together, was a thought that lay too near the human heart to be uprooted by the ills and inequalities of actual life.  In this the Hindu sided altogether with the Hebrew, and as flatly contradicted the unworthy speculations of the modern philosopher, who would fain persuade us that human beings have not issued from one single pair, and also, that the primitive type of men is scarcely separable from that of ordinary animals...."[172]