"The tree of knowledge grew fast by: Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill."-MILTON. Knowledge is here taken disparagingly, in a bad sense, for that wretched experience which man began to acquire for himself" (Calvin). upon the pain of death. Pain; Lat. pana, punishment, penalty. “The wilful sinner has deserved death. Having used the gift of life to revolt against Him from whom he holds it, it is just that this gift should be withdrawn from him. Hence the sentence: In the day thou sinnest, thou shalt die. Every act of sin should thus, in strict justice, be followed by death, the violent and instant death of its author" (Godet). But death here is something far deeper and more awful than the dissolution of the body. Death in the Bible sense is sinfulness; guilt and inward corruption, with all the unspeakable miseries that flow from it. "It appears to me that the definition of this death is to be sought from its opposite; we must, I say, remember from what kind of life man fell. . . . The miseries and evils both of soul and body, with which man is beset so long as he is on earth, are a kind of entrance into death, till death itself entirely absorbs him. Therefore the question is superfluous, how it was that God threatened death to Adam on the day in which he should touch the fruit, when He long delayed the punishment. For then Adam was consigned to death, and death began its reign in him, until supervening grace should bring a remedy" (Calvin). (See Dr. David Brown's Romans, p. 60, in present series.) "Son of heaven and earth, Attend; that thou art happy, owe to God; That is, to thy obedience; therein stand."-MILTON. USES.-I. "There is no religion without this idea of a covenant with a personal God, and therefore all such views as those of Comte, Mill, and Spencer are, for all moral and religious purposes, wholly atheistical. They acknowledge no personality in God; they cannot use the personal pronouns in speaking of Him or to Him. It may, in truth, be said that all religion is covenant, even when religion appears in its most perverted form" (Tayler Lewis). 2. "It is of great importance that the scriptural form of presenting truth should be retained. Rationalism was introduced into the Church under the guise of a philosophical statement of the truths of the Bible free from the outward form in which the sacred writers, trained in Judaism, had presented them. On this ground the federal system, as it was called, was discarded. . . It is far more than a mere matter of method that is involved in adhering to the scriptural form of presenting scriptural truths" (Hodge). 3. 66 Observe, that even Adam in innocency was awed by a threatening. Fear is one of the handles of the soul by which it is taken hold of and held. If he then needed this hedge, much more do we need it now" (Matt. Henry). QUESTIONS. 1. Derive covenant, and point out and explain the scriptural phrases-the Old Covenant; the New Covenant; the Everlasting Covenant; the Books of the Covenant; the Ark of the Covenant; the Blood of the Covenant; the Tables of the Covenant. 2. Derive and explain the newly-adopted word solidarity. 3 What would form answers from Scripture and experience to Satan's sneer : "Knowledge forbidden? Suspicion, reasonless. Why should their Lord The proof of their obedience and their faith?" Q. 13. Did our first parents continue in the estate wherein they were created? A. Our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God. y Gen. iii. 6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat. Ver. 8 And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. Eccles. vii. 29: Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions. being left to the freedom of their own will-It is a very mysterious thing that God should so "innovate upon His own eternity' as to summon into existence a race of creatures, and bestow upon them the perilous gift of free-will-a perilous and in the event a fatal gift: because, as experience proved, the possessor of it might rise up against his Maker, might oppose and obstruct His will, and introduce sin and misery and death where life and love and holiness had been intended to dwell. "Freedom of will is a power in the will, whereby it doth of its own accord, without force upon it, choose or refuse what is proposed to it by the understanding. And man hath this freedom of will in whatever state he be. In the state of innocency it extendeth to good or evil; in the state of corrupt nature, to evil only; in the state of grace, partly to good and partly to evil; and in the state of glory, only to good" (Boston. See this author's famous Fourfold State). "The practice of distinguishing, in the exposition of this subject, between the freedom of man's will in his unfallen and in his fallen condition, and indeed of viewing it distinctively with reference to the different stages or periods of his fourfold state,-as unfallen, fallen, regenerate, or glorified,— has prevailed in the Church in almost all ages. These views were fully brought out and applied by Augustine. . . . They were embraced and pro mulgated by the whole body of Reformers, both Lutheran and Calvinistic. . . They have a prominent place in the Westminster Confession, the 9th chapter, entitled 'Of Free Will,' being entirely devoted to the statement of them (Cunningham's Essay (ix.), Calvinism, and the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity). Let this essay be mastered by all who would understand this subject. "God made thee perfect, not immutable; fell-THE FALL is a technical theological term, appropriated to that catastrophe which is described at length in the third chapter of Genesis, and assumed throughout Scripture. The expression in this historical and original sense is not found in Scripture; its earliest use is in Wisd. x. I. But see Cruden's analysis under the word; also John viii. 44, R. V., "Satan stood not." fell. by sinning against God. "Judas by transgression fell" (Acts i. 25). "The words crime and criminal belong to every language; but sin and sinner belong exclusively to the vocabulary of the Christian revelation (de Maistre). "The word sin, just because it denotes the Godward side of moral evil, branding it as a transgression of moral law, is excluded from the vocabulary of certain philosophical schools, and is seldom heard from the lips of worldly (Binnie). men " USES.-I. "Many there be that complain of Divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, He gave him freedom to choose; for reason is but choosing: he had been else a meer artificiall Adam, such an Adam as he is in the motions" (Areopagitica). 2. "The sovereign will must be granted a right of freedom-that freedom which by putting it into our wills He surely teaches us to honour in His " (Drummond's Natural Law). 3. "The Bible account of the fall and sin, instead of vilifying human nature, implies the highest view of man and his constitution. It is mere perversion of thought and language, however, to represent man's experience of moral evil as not a fall but a rise " (Laidlaw). 4. Butler shows that the supposition of the fall is the ground of the Christian dispensation. 5. Edward Irving goes further: "The very end of the fall was to put the proper distance between the Creator and the creatures and to show the creature that the source and the continuance of its being was from God, and not in any way from itself. And if any one ask me, Could not this, without a fall, have been accomplished? I am ready to answer, As to that I cannot tell; but I believe that this was the best way of accomplishing it." QUESTIONS. 1. Derive and explain estate as it is used in Answers 13, 18, and 20; and point out where in the Catechism we find those various estates most fully drawn out and described. 2. What is meant by saying that a word is technical, and that it is theological and not scriptural? 3. Cunningham says, Hist. Theol. i. 578, that Calvin repeatedly quotes with approC bation the striking and pithy saying of Augustine, that man, by making a bad use of his free-will, lost both himself and it. Explain. 4. Explain also the saying of Klee, a German divine: The fall of man was a twofold process; first he fell out of God into himself, and then he fell out of himself into nature (see Luke xv. 17). 5. What do Bull and Goodwin mean by the phrases: the lubricity of the will; the vertibility and slipperiness of free-will? Q. 14. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God." Z 1 John iii. 4: Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law for sin is the transgression of the law. Sin-Wickedness, iniquity, crime. Skeat follows Curtius in tracing the root to a Teutonic base, A.S. to be. "Language regards the guilty man as the man who it was. Cf. Gen. iii. 12, 13; 2 Sam. xii. 7; Rom. vii. 9. "Sin consists essentially in the motives, dispositions, and volitions of the heart; and the external act only possesses a moral nature by its connection with these internal affections" (Princeton Essays, xi.). want of conformity-Whoso committeth sin transgresseth also the law; for sin is the transgression of the law, and where no law is there is no transgression. The law of God is the rule given to man for all his actions, and wherein he does not conform his actions to that rule he has committed sin. We may commit sin either by doing what we ought not to do, or by not doing what it is our duty to do. We may become guilty either by commission or omission. Want of conformity here means sins of omission, and transgression means the commission of actual deeds of sin. This two-edged definition is admirably observed and illustrated in the analysis of the Ten Commandments given in the practical parts of the Catechism. Under each commandment it is asked, What is required? and, What is forbidden? In other words, What is "conformity" here? and what is "transgression "? See Paterson's Preface. Augustine defines sin as factum vel dictum vel concupitum aliquid contra æternam legem, every work, word, or wish contrary to the law of God. And Trench in his New Testament Synonyms gathers a "mournfully numerous group of words out of Holy Scripture, all of which describe sin in one or other of its many aspects. It is the missing of a mark or aim; it is the overpassing or transgression of a line; it is disobedience to a voice; it is falling where one should have stood upright; it is ignorance of what one ought to have known; it is any diminishing of that which should have been rendered in full measure; it is non-observance of a law; it is a discord, and other evil things and ways "almost out of number." "Sin is no other thing than disagreeableness, in a moral agent, to the law, or rule of his duty. And therefore the degree of sin is to be judged by the rule; so much disagreeableness to the rule, so much sin, whether it be in defect or excess. Sin is an abominable defect, and appears so to the saints, especially those that are eminent" (Edwards). USES.- -I. "Shall I speak the least evil I can say of sin? It is an evil, which in the nature and essence of it, virtually and eminently contains all evils of all kinds that are in the world, insomuch as in the Scriptures you shall find that all the evils of the world serve but to answer for it, and to give names to it. Hence sin, it is called poison, and sinners, serpents; sin is called a vomit, and sinners, dogs; it is the stench of graves, and they rotten sepulchres; it is mire, sinners, sows; and sin, darkness, blindness, shame, nakedness, folly, madness, death, whatever is filthy, defective, infective, painful. It is so evil that it cannot have a worse epithet given to it than itself; and therefore the apostle, when he would speak his worst of it, and wind up his expression highest, usque ad hyperbolem, calls it by its own name, sinful sin (Rom. vii. 13). It is sinning sin, you cannot call it by a worse name than its own (Goodwin). 2. "Sin is the living worm, the lasting fire; Hell soon would lose its heat, could sin expire, Look to thyself then, keep it out of door, Of sin, to make them laugh themselves to hell. Look to thyself, then, deal with sin no more, Lest He who saves, against thee shuts the door."-BUNYAN. QUESTIONS. 1. Hodge points out that the sinfulness of any "want of conformity" lies ultimately in want of congeniality. Explain. 2. The Catechism at its strongest is much less severe in its language concerning sin than the Scriptures. Give some illustrations of the awful language used in the word of God about sin. And study the terrific account of the procreation of sin by Satan, its father, in Paradise Lost. 3. Divinity students, and all who would know more of this subject, should see Dr. Hodge's analysis of Augustine's doctrine of sin in his second volume. Also the "mournfully numerous group of scriptural synonyms for sin in Trench. Under Sin let students consult the index to Dr. Thomas Goodwin's Works, the most scriptural and by far the most suggestive of all the Puritan divines. 4. Illustrate the criminality of sins of omission from our Lord's parables. Q. 15. What was the sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created? A. The sin whereby our first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created, was their eating the forbidden fruit.a a Gen. iii. 6. [See in letter v.] Ver. 12 The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. the forbidden fruit. "There was no evil in the fruit itself. The evil of the matter lay in man's eating it against the express command of God. God |