the sensuous temptation taking the lead in the transgression, though the more spiritual took the lead in the enticement. The Tempter's suggestion appealed to what was highest and to what was lowest in the elements of human nature: to its unbounded capacity of Gen. iii. 6, knowledge and to its sensibility of the pleasures of sense. 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. It must not, however, be inferred from this that the Fall of man was simply a decline into the slavery of sense. There is no sin that does not begin in the spirit, though it may be made perfect in the flesh. The first sinners rejected the restraint of God's Holy Spirit, and made themselves independent in thought and will, before the fruit of the forbidden tree could become a real temptation. This hidden mystery of iniquity, behind the act of transgression, was only brought to light in the recorded Fall.

Effects.

3. The immediate consequences of the lapse into sin are plainly disclosed, though still in a style partly symbolical and figurative. The first effect is described in language with which the inmost experience of men makes them familiar. It was the immediate Gen. iii, 5, knowledge of good and evil: the birth of evil conscience, the moral consciousness disturbed by a sense of guilt; the beginning of shame, or the sense of degradation and vileness. This double consciousness was, as it were, a new birth unto unrighteousness: the first realisation in experience of the distinction between good and evil, a distinction, however, which had been theoretically made known by revelation to our parents while yet untransgressing. Thus we see the external relations and the internal at once depicted: guilt before their Judge and pollution in His sight. These drove the transgressors from the presence of their Maker, which was the converse of the sentiment of one of their descendants: depart Lake v. 8. from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord! They fled from God, Gen. iii. 8, because God had departed from them. They hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God: not as if they had sunk so low as to think it possible that the trees should hide them, but from the sentiment of spiritual fear. They felt at once that they were, unless the Creator Himself should interpose, for ever separated fro Him. Hence we have in the simple record of the effects of the first transgression all the elements of the doctrine of sin. It was the

internal deviation of the will from the will of the Supreme; it was objective guilt, the Divine vindication of eternal law in the conscience; it was guilt subjectively, as the consciousness of personal fault and obligation to punishment; and it was the expression of a sense of separation, for the time of hopeless separation; from the presence of God: the supreme penalty of sin.

and

II. The term FALL is probably derived from the sublime descrip- The Fall tion of Wisdom and her works in an apocryphal book which Active contains some other references to the beginning of sin, showing Passive. how much the later Jewish theology was occupied with the subject. She preserved the first formed father of the world, that was Wisd. x.l created alone, and brought him out of his Full. Here, indeed, the fall is that of the individual first father: but the true instinct of interpretation has always made Adam and mankind one, and therefore adopted the expression FALL OF MAN. It was the voluntary descent of the human will from its unity with the will of God; it was the consequent degradation of mankind from the high prerogatives belonging to the Divine image in which man was created. Both the active and the passive meaning of the word, as introduced into theological language, must be retained.

Active.

1. As to the former, a superficial glance at the scene that The Fall begins human history in the garden has led many to the conclusion that our first parents were the victims of circumstance; that they were deceived, and unwittingly stumbled; that mighty temptation from without co-operated with the simplicity of their own unformed and undisciplined conscience to ruin them unawares. But it must be remembered that the beings whose free personality the Righteous God tested were created upright. Their liberty was perfect that is, not merely they possessed the faculty of willing or choosing indeterminately, as unconstrained by necessary law from without; but their formal will was filled by its real object, fixed upon God Himself. The very nature and the terms of the test show that they understood the alternative of good and evil they were taught that good was perfect obedience to the Divine will, and that evil-which they knew and yet knew not-was disobedience to that will. Though it was the Enemy who said, Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil, it was not he Gen. iii. & who first introduced to the human mind the most tremendous of

:

Gren. ii. 17.

The Fall

7

all alternatives. For God's warning was, in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. What other teaching they had we are not informed; but certainly we may conclude that they were not left in ignorance of the relation between the solitary positive precept and the more general unspoken law of their duty as creatures of God. Nor do we know what education they had received, nor how long they had received it, from communion with their Maker and the teaching of the Holy Ghost. We only know that on the part both of Eve and of Adam there was a wilful revolt against the Almighty; that the act of their will was not simply the abuse of the liberty of indifference-which in their case could not exist but the actual wresting of it from its determined and rightful Object; that never has human will been more absolute in its working than theirs; that it was, so to speak, the concentrated will of humanity turned from good to evil.

2. The passive Fall was commensurate with so great an evil. Passive. Viewed apart from the Rising Again in Christ, it was a total descent of mankind from its high destination; involving the very earth in its consequences; and deepening the doom of the chief agent of temptation, not omitting the degradation of the subordinate agent which he had employed. Man was no longer the image 1 Cor. xi. and glory of God; for, though he retained his human nature inviolate as created in the Divine image, the glory of that image was lost. His nature-using that term in its secondary sense as the moral quality of its disposition invariably appearing in every reproduction of the original type-became entirely perverted. 1 Cor. xi. Nor was woman any longer the glory of the man, in the best sense of that word: the relation of woman to man was deprived thenceforward of its highest perfection. Man fell from his destination : that of an eternal progress from glory to glory in sinless fellowship with his Creator. He declined into a lower sphere: out of communion with heaven, into a life of external discord and internal misery. He lost his intuitive vision of God, no longer held discourse with his Maker through the symbols of Lature, and had to begin, he and all that should be his, the very first principles of a spiritual world. But we know not how great was the Fall: after the first words of the Divine displeasure, not another comment is made on the subject. It further influerce on the race, and its mitigation through

7.

the universal Atonement is before us, but not immediately. If that Fall was not total, it was because the Redeemer's unseen Hand arrested it. The Child Jesus, already the new Father and Head of mankind, was even then set for the Fall and RISING AGAIN Lu. ii. 34 of the human race. More, however, on this brighter aspect of the subject must be reserved for the doctrine of Original Sin.

The Coming

Redemp

tion.

3. In this fact-the coming redemption, or rather that redemption which was revealed before Paradise was shut on our first parents--we have the only answer that can be given to the protests which have been honestly or dishonestly urged against the narrative of the Fall. We are not indeed at a loss to vindicate the justice of the Holy God in His deep displeasure at the first offence. But we have not to do with the holiness of God apart from His love. From the beginning mercy rejoiceth against judgment. The James ii. Mediator is already between the Judge and the sinner. And if God's justice turned the first transgressors to destruction when He drove out the man from the Paradise of His presence forfeited by his sin, His mercy is still heard, following hard upon His wrath, Return, ye children of men.

13.

Ps. xc. 3.

Gen. iii.

24.

Theories of sin.

Original Principle of Evil.

Parsism.

THEORIES OF THE ORIGIN OF SIN.

Philosophical speculation propounds various theories to account for the derivation of sin, which, as one of the most universal facts in experience, must have some common cause. These theories combine its origin and its nature in one, it being impossible perfectly to separate the two ideas. The most desperate of all expedients boldly assumes an eternal principle of evil, which in its creaturely workings becomes sin. The most specious solution makes what seems to be evil merely the creaturely limitation on its way to perfection. Between these and combining them is the less philosophical theory that makes sin the effect of the residence of the spirit in the flesh of concupiscence. A consideration of these hypotheses will lead to the true cause of sin as given by Scripture, and confirmed by man's common sense, the abuse of the gift of liberty.

ETERNAL PRINCIPLE OF EVIL.

The first and most ancient speculations accounted for the existence of sin by assuming a necessary PRINCIPLE OF EVIL in the universe.

1. Inherited from the remote east, this notion was held in the Gnostic sects of early Christianity, in Manichæism, and in certain systems which sprang up in the medieval Western Church. Zoroaster (Zarathustra), the real or imaginary founder of the religion of Parsism, about the time of the later Jewish prophets, represented Ormuzd (Ahura-Mazda) as the author of all good and Ahriman (Anra-Mainyus) as the author of all evil in the nature of things. These were independent personal spirits, ruling absolutely each in his own dominion; yet not so absolutely as to be unrelated to each other, since they were in perpetual conflict, and all created beings are cailed to make choice between then. This