and princes decree justice. I love them that love Me, and they that seek Me early shall find Me' (Prov. viii. 12-17).

No doubt, then, in those days before the fall, when man walked with God, wisdom was revealed to him from the mouth of his Creator, and man grew in the knowledge of the Lord. Eve, therefore, had full and abundant means of attaining wisdom from the 'Word of the Lord,' amply sufficient to satisfy all her desires after knowledge, and until the tempter came there could have been no more temptation to her in the tree of knowledge of good and evil, than the dinner of a peasant has to a rich man with the most tempting dishes at his command. Yet, although Eve knew that God was the Source of all wisdom, she thought to obtain it elsewhere. Here was another delusion.

But yet, again, the knowledge of an infinite God and of His works could not be attained in a day, or indeed in numberless ages, nor could there be any means of attaining it but by the mind of God revealing itself to the mind of man, step by step, revelation succeeding revelation, new truths following those already acquired. To suppose, then, that truth could be learned without being told it, or that wisdom could be attained without learning it, was to suppose an absurdity. Yet this was another of Eve's delusions.

Finally, spirit and matter were confused by her; she thought that food for the body might be food for the mind, and that the spirit could grow by what was not spiritual.

The fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil had no occult virtue in itself, either in its effect on the body, or on the mind. It was the prohibition of God that made it what it was, namely, the revealer of sin to him who, by eating of it, broke the law of God. Man knew already what was good, for he knew God;

but by dis

obeying God he attained a new and bitter experience, even the knowledge of sin, that evil thing, the source of all evil and pain, which when it is finished bringeth forth death.'

Moreover, the temptation which overcame Eve was of precisely the same nature as that to which Satan himself had yielded. It appealed to that desire for perfection, or growth in knowledge, wisdom, and happiness which is the essential law of all moral beings; and it seemed to promise the attainment of them by a short and easy method within her own power, which made her independent of God, and by so doing placed the desire for happiness and perfection in seeming direct opposition to that loyalty to God on which her real happiness and growth and perfection depended.

It seemed as if it would make her self-dependent for all knowledge, power, and happiness, and make her, in fact, self-existent; and in yielding to it she cast off her dependence on God. Not only so, but, rejecting the command of God for the advice of Satan, she transferred her trust and dependence from one to the other.

But Adam was not deceived. He yielded to the ties of moral sympathy and physical attraction which bound him to his wife, and which, had he refused to partake of her act, would have been partially severed; but it was with his eyes open, and while the present influence of his wife proved stronger than that of the unseen Creator, he did not, like her, wilfully repudiate his dependence on the latter. So that while Eve sinned wilfully, or with the full consent of her blinded mind and conscience, Adam did wrong knowing it to be wrong, and his conscience still remained on the side of God.

Thus Eve fell completely under the dominion of evil and of Satan, her conscience for the time being dead, and it is this that distinguishes wilful sin from other sin which is yielded to under the force of tempta

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tion, but against which the conscience protests. There is no recovery from the power of wilful sin if committed after having received the knowledge of the truth, and in wilful repudiation of it; and Eve's sin was of this character, in so far as it was against the truth revealed to her by the command of God, and acknowledged by her own conscience. But because it was only partial truth, and the full evil of sin was as yet unknown to her, therefore her conscience was only temporarily deadened, and would awake again when the sin was finished.

To suppose, then, that sin committed through the mind being deceived, and therefore with a quiet conscience, is of less guilt than other sin is a great error, for such sin argues one of two things: either that there is such a perversion of the moral faculties from education, or from their gradual decadence through many generations, each sinking lower than the former, that what remains is not recognisable, and the person seems to be like the animals, who are morally irredeemable; or else, by perpetually silencing the conscience, in order to sin without discomfort, it has been killed, and the person has ceased to be any longer a moral being or capable of becoming one. The first is the case of the ignorant savage or idolater. The latter is that of those who, having known the truth, have repudiated it.

Nevertheless, Adam as well as Eve sinned against the law of his moral being in transgressing the command of God, and in so doing departed from Him, and became for the time self-dependent and subject to the law of self, or of the flesh.

When this law of self is the only law of existence, as it is in the animals, there is not only no capacity for becoming a moral being, but the happiness derivable from moral causes, love, compassion, truth, etc., is no longer an object of interest, and is eliminated from the sum of that creature's aims and desires.

The law of self thus becomes the law of selfishness, and in those in whom it is supreme, the powers and capacities of the mind and body are all devoted to it. In the animals, the whole end and object of their being is the fulfilment of the appetites of the body; but in man, with his loftier intellect, the desires are more intellectual,* and in addition to the physical and psychical desires of the body, the law of self induces him to strive after dominion over his fellow-men by the attainment of riches, power, knowledge, honour, and whatever is regarded in this world as giving its possessor superiority; and in the pursuit of these, those who are most entirely governed by this law trample upon the weak and whoever stands in their way, regardless of justice, truth, compassion, and even of natural affection, and fill the world with sin and misery. For, as writes the Apostle, the carnal mind,' i.e., the mind of the flesh, is enmity against God, and is not subject to the law of God,' i.e., of righteousness, neither indeed can be' (Rom. viii. 7). The animals, in whom selfishness is the supreme law, are called in Scripture the beasts which perish,' because there is nothing in them to unite them morally to God, in whom alone is eternal life. This must equally be the case with men who have wholly severed their moral union with God; and when our first parents sinned, and by so doing severed the bond of dependence which united them to God, they immediately became, like the beasts, subject to the law of sin and death.

That one such act of separation should produce this result may appear strange, but, as we shall see, the separation, once begun, had necessarily a continual tendency to increase and deepen. All the effects of this law of sin, and consequent death, did not come into full

* With the decay or death of conscience and the moral perceptions, all desire for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and all love of the truth for the sake of the truth itself, would probably cease.

force at once, either in the case of the individual or the race. The warning of God with regard to the consequences of disobedience was that, dying, they should die,' and the meaning of this will be seen when we consider the nature of that spiritual death, and its accompanying physical decay and death, which followed the fall of man.