his first apostasy, the Original Sin. The link between the pride which caused his ruin and the transgression of our first parents. Gen iii. 5. was this: ye shall be as gods! Our sin is, so to speak, a reflection or continuation of his. Hence he retains his empire and headship, as the lord and representative of the principle of evil. He has set up a kingdom of which he and not Adam is the head. Oʻ this more hereafter; for the present it will be enough to enumerate the names of the original sinner, whose relation to the lapse of mankind is his aggravated condemnation, but not the excuse of human depravity. (1) As the representative of evil or sin in 1 John iii. itself he is called That Wicked One, absolutely; and of the proMatt.xiii. pagation of all the innumerable seeds of sin it is said: the enemy 12. 4. 30. Eph. ii. 2. 39. that sowed them is the Devil. (2) As the representative and lord of 2 Cor. iv. the empire of sin, he is the God of this world, the Prince of John xiv. this world, the Prince of the power of the air, the Spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience; a collocation which places him in solemn antithesis to the Persons of the Holy Trinity respectively, the first with the Father, the second with the Son, Matt. xii, and the third with the Holy Ghost; especially when his kingdom is taken into the account. (3) As the representative of the Job i. 6, spirit of enmity to goodness he is Satan, or the Adversary, the passim. Devil, and the Tempter. (4) The tenour of the New Testament 26. Fall of makes him generally the embodiment of sin: its origin, lord, promoter, witness, and executioner. Always and everywhere he and his angels are real persons: the personality of no agents is more expressly revealed or spoken of in terms less liable to misapprehension. But this question enters here indirectly. THE FALL OF MANKIND. The Mosaic account of the Probation and Fall of the First Pair is an inspired narrative of the origin of sin in the human race; it is not a collection of early traditions or myths; nor an allegorical method of teaching the moral history of sin in man; nor a combination of history, allegory, and legend; but an historical narrative of facts, which, however, are bound up with symbols that must have their interpretation as such. In that interpretation the utmost caution is necessary. But no exposition can pretend to solve every difficulty, or obviate every objection; because in our estate of sin we have no experience of the original condition of our first parents, and therefore have not the key to the solution of the mystery of their temptation and subjection to evil. The brief account records that man was placed in a state of trial, with the consciousness of the possibility of sin or separation of his will from the Divine will; it describes the circumstances and the nature, external and internal, of the temptation from without; and it sets before us the preliminaries, the act, and the immediate consequences of the first transgression or what in our human annals is the Fall of Man. THE NARRATIVE. The Record gives its account of the ruin of mankind as history that of a beginning which flows on without break into the subsequent course of redemption. As a narrative of simple facts it is seldom alluded to in either Testament; but such allusions as we find assume its historical reality. Our Lord gives His sanction to the account of the creation, quoting its very words, and indirectly including the Fall itself. St. Paul again and again refers to the incidents as recorded in Genesis. The history is tacitly recognised as history-primitive, fragmentary, Oriental, it may be, and deeply symbolical, but Divine-throughout the sacred oracles. The Record I. The few references in Scripture are very explicit. The more Scripture carefully they are observed, in their context, the more obvious will it be that the account of the first transgression must be received in its simplicity, with its commingled facts and symbols, by all who hold sacred the authority of our Lord and His Apostles. ment. Job xxxi. 33. Old Testa 1. In the Old Testament there are few undeniable allusions to the circumstances of the Fall. We read in Job: if I covered my transgressims as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom. To conceal iniquity is after the manner of men, but there appears to be a marked reference to the colloquy between Adam and his Maker. A passage in Hosea has been often quoted in favour of Hos. vi. 7. the Paradisiacal covenant of works: but they, like Adam, have transgressed the covenant. This however may be, and is, translated, like men. Throughout the older economy Adam is merged in his posterity; and the fall of mankind, like the sin which caused it, is everywhere assumed as a postulate. The Old Testament Heb.vi. 1. is not constantly laying again the foundation, rather it is always leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ. Hence, as in the two passages quoted above, man is Adam, and Adam is man. Gospels. 2. In the Gospels there is literally not one express allusion to the narrative of the first catastrophe. It needed not our Lord's corroboration and therefore did not receive it. But if we weigh well His words, on the question of divorce, we must conclude that Matt. xix. the whole record has His supreme sanction as historical. Have ye 4, 5. not read that He which made them at the beginning made them male and female, and said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh? They who read this as history read as history what immediately follows; and the Redeemer's declarations, already quoted, conJohn viii. cerning the murderer from the beginning, refer obviously to the very narrative of Genesis. 44. St. Paul. 3. 2 Cor. xi. 3. St. Paul, who inherited the later Jewish doctrine, and gave much of it Christian sanction, more than once confirms the literal 2 Cor. xi. texture of our narrative. So must we interpret his words, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty; where he means Satan, 14. who was and is transformed into an angel of light instead of creepRom. xvi. ing on the earth. So also his prophecy and prayer, the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet, which is an echo of the first promise given to man through the condemnation of the Devil. Here it may be observed, in passing, that the Apostle by the use of the term transformed gives us the only solution we need of the difficulty of temptation through the voice of a serpent. St. 20. Paul, moreover, as we shall see, founds his argument of Original Apocalypse. 9. 4. The comparative reserve of the rest of Scripture as to the facts and symbols of the narrative is broken through in the last book. The Apocalypse returns back to Genesis, and quotes almost every particular in such a manner as at once to sanction the literalness of the account and to relieve it of some of its difficulties. The final promise to the first Church of the Seven is: to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in Rev. ii. 7 the midst of the paradise of God. Here the literal Eden of man, and the literal tree from which he was excluded, reappear in their heavenly significance; but the spiritual, which is afterward, implies the reality of the natural which was first. The doom upon Satan has also its spiritual and eternal meaning: and the Rev. xii. great Dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. His seduction of our first parents is merged in his universal temptation from the Fall downwards; but the tremendous reality of the conflict between him and the Seed of the Woman through all the ages of redemption is based upon, it flows from, the first literal triumph permitted of God. The light of the apocalyptic glory shines through all intervening ages up to the darkened paradise of the Fall, not relieving it of ita impenetrable mystery, but confirming its literal truth. It bids us study the narrative in the spirit of simple faith: leaving to God Himself the vindication of His righteous judgments and unsearchable ways, and rejoicing only that the leaves of the Tree of Life are for the healing of the nations, and that there shall be no more Rev. xxii curse to those who enter the heavenly Paradise. 2, 3. II. The two theories of interpretation termed Mythical and Theories. Allegorical are really one; with this important difference, however, that the former denies the Divine authority which the latter admits or does not exclude. 1. The Mythical theory appeals to the universal traditions of Mythical Paradise and the Golden Age, the unhistorical character of the Serpent, the trees, the walking of God in the evening, and other features of the detail, as all indicating a legendary origin. It is said that the Hebrew narrative is only one tribal version of an idea common among the early nations. We accept the truth that VOL. II. -2 Allego rical. Symbolist. Narrative written in Sacramental terms. underlies this false theory. The traditions of many nations contain mythical accounts which have been woven out of the threads of a primitive tradition; but they declare their legendary character on the surface. There is no Myth in the Bible, as has been already shown; and the traditions of the early history of the world recorded in Genesis are in no way connected with any particular people. They profess to have been revealed to the first writer of the Biblical documents; and are incorporated into Scrip. ture as such. They belong to the archives of the race, and not of any one family in it: Divine Tradition before all human traditions. 2. The Allegorical method of explaining this first chapter of human history has been adopted by the mystical school, from Philo, Clemens Alexandrinus, and Origen downwards, through Maimonides, to modern times. It admits the Divine origin of the Mosaic account of the introduction of sin; and supposes that the whole scene is figurative, representing by a continuous allegory the facts of the Fall, but having no more connection with those facts than the allegory of the Vine brought out of Egypt had with the redemption of Israel. Now it is undeniable that the essential meaning of the whole narrative may be extracted from it on this principle, as may be seen in some of the best expositions of the Alexandrian school. But this canon of interpretation is repudiated, as will be seen, by the clear and unclouded testimony of later Scripture, as well as by the strict literality of the style of the opening chapter of Genesis in general. Fact and Parable are Divinely interwoven. 3. The purely historical character of the narrative may be maintained in perfect consistency with a full acknowledgment of the large element of symbolism in it. It must be remembered that the scene of Paradise, though introduced into human history, belongs to an order of events very different from anything that human experience knows or can rightly appreciate. (1.) While the narrative is true, and every circumstance in it real, there is not a feature of the Paradisaical history of man that is purely natural, as we now understand the term. The process of human probation, whether longer or shorter, was supernaturally conducted by symbols, the deep meaning of which we know now only in part, though our first parents perhaps understood them by |