Adam and Eve

74:5.1For al­most seven years af­ter Adam’s ar­rival the Mel­chiz­e­dek re­ceivers re­mained on duty, but the time fi­nally came when they turned the ad­min­is­tra­tion of world af­fairs over to Adam and re­turned to Je­ru­sem.

74:5.2The farewell of the re­ceivers oc­cu­pied the whole of a day, and dur­ing the evening the in­di­vid­ual Mel­chiz­e­deks gave Adam and Eve their part­ing ad­vice and best wishes. Adam had sev­eral times re­quested his ad­vis­ers to re­main on earth with him, but al­ways were these pe­ti­tions de­nied. The time had come when the Ma­te­rial Sons must as­sume full re­spon­si­bil­ity for the con­duct of world af­fairs. And so, at mid­night, the se­raphic trans­ports of Sa­ta­nia left the planet with four­teen be­ings for Je­ru­sem, the trans­la­tion of Van and Amadon oc­cur­ring si­mul­ta­ne­ously with the de­par­ture of the twelve Mel­chiz­e­deks.

74:5.3All went fairly well for a time on Uran­tia, and it ap­peared that Adam would, even­tu­ally, be able to de­velop some plan for pro­mot­ing the grad­ual ex­ten­sion of the Edenic civ­i­liza­tion. Pur­suant to the ad­vice of the Mel­chiz­e­deks, he be­gan to fos­ter the arts of man­u­fac­ture with the idea of de­vel­op­ing trade re­la­tions with the out­side world. When Eden was dis­rupted, there were over one hun­dred prim­i­tive man­u­fac­tur­ing plants in op­er­a­tion, and ex­ten­sive trade re­la­tions with the near-by tribes had been es­tab­lished.

74:5.4For ages Adam and Eve had been in­structed in the tech­nique of im­prov­ing a world in readi­ness for their spe­cial­ized con­tri­bu­tions to the ad­vance­ment of evo­lu­tion­ary civ­i­liza­tion; but now they were face to face with press­ing prob­lems, such as the es­tab­lish­ment of law and or­der in a world of sav­ages, bar­bar­ians, and semi­civ­i­lized hu­man be­ings. Aside from the cream of the earth’s pop­u­la­tion, as­sem­bled in the Gar­den, only a few groups, here and there, were at all ready for the re­cep­tion of the Adamic cul­ture.

74:5.5Adam made a heroic and de­ter­mined ef­fort to es­tab­lish a world gov­ern­ment, but he met with stub­born re­sis­tance at ev­ery turn. Adam had al­ready put in op­er­a­tion a sys­tem of group con­trol through­out Eden and had fed­er­ated all of these com­pa­nies into the Edenic league. But trou­ble, se­ri­ous trou­ble, en­sued when he went out­side the Gar­den and sought to ap­ply these ideas to the out­ly­ing tribes. The mo­ment Adam’s as­so­ciates be­gan to work out­side the Gar­den, they met the di­rect and well-planned re­sis­tance of Cali­gas­tia and Dali­gas­tia. The fallen Prince had been de­posed as world ruler, but he had not been re­moved from the planet. He was still pres­ent on earth and able, at least to some ex­tent, to re­sist all of Adam’s plans for the re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion of hu­man so­ci­ety. Adam tried to warn the races against Cali­gas­tia, but the task was made very dif­fi­cult be­cause his arch­en­emy was in­vis­i­ble to the eyes of mor­tals.

74:5.6Even among the Eden­ites there were those con­fused minds that leaned to­ward the Cali­gas­tia teach­ing of un­bri­dled per­sonal lib­erty; and they caused Adam no end of trou­ble; al­ways were they up­set­ting the best-laid plans for or­derly pro­gres­sion and sub­stan­tial de­vel­op­ment. He was fi­nally com­pelled to with­draw his pro­gram for im­me­di­ate so­cial­iza­tion; he fell back on Van’s method of or­ga­ni­za­tion, di­vid­ing the Eden­ites into com­pa­nies of one hun­dred with cap­tains over each and with lieu­tenants in charge of groups of ten.

74:5.7Adam and Eve had come to in­sti­tute rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment in the place of monar­chial, but they found no gov­ern­ment wor­thy of the name on the face of the whole earth. For the time be­ing Adam aban­doned all ef­fort to es­tab­lish rep­re­sen­ta­tive gov­ern­ment, and be­fore the col­lapse of the Edenic regime he suc­ceeded in es­tab­lish­ing al­most one hun­dred out­ly­ing trade and so­cial cen­ters where strong in­di­vid­u­als ruled in his name. Most of these cen­ters had been or­ga­nized afore­time by Van and Amadon.

74:5.8The send­ing of am­bas­sadors from one tribe to an­other dates from the times of Adam. This was a great for­ward step in the evo­lu­tion of gov­ern­ment.