planted and equipped, needing only to be worked. God put Adam in the garden to till it and keep it for him, we are told in Genesis 2.
So what's gone wrong with our world? Why have things turned sour and all our hopes foundered? Why do those optimistic dreams of a better society prove again and again to be elusive fantasies, like mirages in the desert?
A hundred years ago, at the very end of the nineteenth century, humanist intellectuals spoke with Promethean confidence about the glorious future that awaited the human race in the twentieth century: freedom from illness, war, poverty. The human race, guided by science and technology, they said, was on a route to a new golden age. They were sure of it. Everybody believed it. But instead, of course, these last hundred years have seen military conflict on an unprecedented global scale. They have witnessed famines of unparalleled dimensions. And as for freedom from illness, the medical science which has conquered smallpox and tuberculosis finds itself in the 1990s helpless before the pandemic scourge of the AIDS virus.
Now in the 1990s, just as in the 1890s, there are those who, encouraged by the arrival not just of a new century but of a new millennium, speak once more in utopian terms about the dawn of a 'New Age'. Strange, isn't it, how that row of noughts on the end of the year 2000 is invested with almost mystical significance?
I wonder under what twenty-first century horrors that optimism is going to be buried in our children's lifetimes. It doesn't bear thinking about. The idyllic dream of the Garden of Eden keeps returning to haunt the human race, but it is nothing but a dream, a tantalizing, unrealisable dream of paradise lost. Why is it, Jesus, that we human beings are forever more insecure and violent, the further we advance? What's gone wrong in the vineyard, Jesus?
Is it that these tenant farmers have not yet evolved sufficiently from their animal origins to cooperate
