Adam Refused the Animals Who Came to Worship Him

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The Ring That Closed Around the First Man

The first thing Adam did with his eyes was use them. Green, and more green, and a sky over it, all of it moving.

"How great are Thy works, O Lord!"

That was his opening line, spoken to nobody he could see, before hunger, before loneliness, before he had a name for a single thing in front of him. And the works of the Lord heard it.

Birds came down off the branches. Cattle left the grass. The small things that live under leaves and stones came out and crossed open ground toward him, and the ring around him tightened and tightened without ever becoming a threat. They had looked at the tall one with speech coming out of his mouth, and they had drawn the obvious conclusion.

Then they bowed.

He could have let them. One breath, one second of silence, and every living thing on earth would have spent the rest of its existence facing the wrong direction, and the man who let it happen would have owned a world before his first sunset.

"Why do you come to worship me?" he said. "Nay, you and I together will acknowledge the majesty and the might of Him who hath created us all." And then, because they were still down and still waiting: "The Lord reigneth. He is apparelled with majesty."

Feathers settled. Hooves shifted in the dirt. The ring opened and the garden went back to grazing.

The Bird on the Golden Statue

Adam built on that ground afterward, and Cain and Abel built there after him, and when the flood had finished with the world and the water went down, Noah came off the ark and put up an altar on the same spot. God blessed him there and set him over the world exactly as Adam had been set over it. Later the sanctuary in Jerusalem would stand on that patch of dirt.

The ruling was the easy part. Holding the shape God had made was not.

A king once had a likeness of himself cast in gold and stood it in his courtyard. A bird came down on it and fouled it. Man was fashioned upright, and then something inside him climbs up onto the work and ruins the face.

Hiram of Tyre came out of the mold perfect in his ways from the day he was made, and wickedness turned up in him anyway, and he was put out. The generation after the flood had one language and one speech, and what they did with it was agree to build a tower with its top in heaven. Heaven came down to look at the city they had built, and scattered them across the earth, and left a proverb behind about them. What a strap, out of such a hide.

Hadrian Came Home and Asked to Be Worshipped

Rome's turn came a long way down the line, and Hadrian took it the way the tower builders had, which is to say from the top.

He had conquered the world. He came back and told his courtiers so. "I command you to acclaim me a divine being, for I have subjugated the entire world."

They had one objection, and it was not a moral one. "You do not rule the Holy City and the Temple."

So he went and took the Holy City. He pulled the Temple down and sent the people who served in it out of the country, and then he came back to Rome and stood in front of the same men.

"Now I have destroyed His house, burned down His holy palace, and exiled His people. Worship me as a divine being."

Three Men in His Court Answered Him

Three philosophers lived in Hadrian's court, and he got a different answer from each of them.

The first was procedural. A man cannot mount a revolt against a king while he is living inside the king's own house. Step outside the palace first, and then declare yourself. "He fashioned the heavens and created the earth. Now depart from them, and you shall be a divine being."

The second quoted the sentence already written for cases like his. The gods that have not made the heaven and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.

The third asked for a favor. "Help me, I implore your assistance."

Hadrian, who liked being asked, leaned in. "What is the trouble?"

"I have a ship three miles out at sea, and it is stranded, and all my possessions are in it."

"I will send my legions and my ships to rescue it."

"Sire, why send your ships and legions? Send forth a blast of wind and save it."

The room waited. "From whence should I have a blast of wind to send?"

"If you are unable to send forth a blast of wind, how can you call yourself a god?"

His Wife Named the Deposit

He went into his own house badly shaken, and his wife took his side.

Those men were mocking him, she said. Of course he could make himself a god. He was a mighty and powerful king and everything belonged to him. There was only one thing left to do. Return His deposit to Him, and it would be finished.

"What is His deposit?"

"Your soul."

"But if my soul departs from me, how shall I survive?"

"If you cannot control your soul, how can you call yourself a god? You are merely a mortal and not a god."

Every man who ever wanted this built his house on water, and the water was always the answer. Pharaoh raised a palace in the middle of the Nile and dammed the river so it would not run out to sea, and said, my river is my own. The water came up under the foundations, lifted the building off them, and carried it away, and later the same element closed over him and his army. Sennacherib set his palace in Lebanon between two high mountains with every protection an engineer could design, and wells broke out of the mountains and tore it loose. Hiram put his between the Adriatic and the Mediterranean and went down into the pit with the rest of them.

The only man who was ever actually offered it stood in a garden with every animal on earth kneeling in front of him. He refused, and told the animals to get up and face the other way.