Genesis 3

1. Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of any tree of the garden? 2 And the woman said unto the serpent, Of the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat: 3 but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat 4 of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not 5 surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, 6 and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat; and she gave also unto her husband with 7 her, and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

Genesis opens with the account of the tempter in the garden, securing the fall of our first parents; and the Apocalypse closes with the prediction of his final overthrow and destruction in company with all those who have persistently adhered to his revolt. The intervening books consistently speak of his character, of his direct antagonism to Christ, and of his schemes and influence during the world’s history, and warn us against his snares. W. W. Patton.

The narrative of this chapter must be either all plain matter of fact, or all allegory. For no writer of true history would mix plain matter of fact with allegory in the same continued narrative, without any intimation of a transition from the one to the other. If therefore any part of this narrative be matter of fact, no part of it is allegorical. If any part be allegorical, no part is naked matter of fact. If the formation of the woman out of man be allegory, the woman must be an allegorical woman. The man must therefore be an allegorical man; for of such a man only the allegorical woman will be a meet companion. If the man be allegorical, his Paradise is an allegorical garden; the trees that grew in it, allegorical trees; the rivers that watered it, allegorical rivers; and thus we may ascend to the very beginning of the creation, and conclude at last that the heavens are allegorical heavens, and the earth an allegorical earth. Thus the whole history of the creation will be an allegory, of which the real subject is not disclosed, and in this absurdity the whole scheme of allegorizing ends Bp. Horsley.

The reasons for regarding the Biblical account of the Fall as historical, are these: It is organically united with the narrative of the creation, which takes the usual formula of Hebrew history—“these are the generations.” It appears in a Book which by uniformly and distinctly recognizing one living and personal God, and by distinctly defining man’s moral relation to Him, leaves no room for a mythology. It is recorded in the old, simple, objective style of historical narrative; reminding us of the significant fact that, unlike other nations of antiquity with whom the poetic element preceded the historical, Hebrew poetry always looks back to Hebrew history. While the mythological, moreover, is always national, local, and particular, the Biblical account, both of the Creation and the Fall, has the character of true universality. The account also, in connection with that of the creation, forms the introduction to an acknowledged history—that of the Theocracy. It is the only account which, from its view of sin, assumes and really possesses a historical character. In all the ancient accounts, apart from Biblical influence, sin is either an unreal or an eternal thing. Pantheism, as in the Egyptian, Phoenician and Babylonian traditions, by treating sin as an unreality, renounces its historical existence. Dualism, of which Parseeism, Brahmanism, and the later Manichaeism, are forms, by regarding it as eternal, make a first sin, as the act of a free being—impossible. It is only where both the finitude and the individual liberty of man are apprehended, as they are in Genesis, that the nature of sin is recognized, and a first sin is possible. The Biblical account, too, is full of historical details and facts. Thus, it contains a minute geographical description of Paradise: the condition of mankind, threatened in this narrative as a punishment, actually exists: and the account of the same human progenitors, here brought into view, is continuously carried forward as history. Then, again, sin and salvation—the two fundamental ideas of the narrative—form the germ of which the entire Bible is the development. In addition to all which, the historical character of the narrative is repeatedly recognized in the New Testament, where the presence of this spiritual agent in the natural serpent is distinctly recognized. J. H.

The narrative of the first sin has not only a consistency that grows on the contemplation, but offers the only solution of the dim traditions of the distant past. It offers perhaps all the help that can be given when it traces the source of the seduction to an outer influence, distinctly explained in the New Testament, as “that old serpent which is called the devil and Satan,” and when it couples with the persuasions of the appetite the specious inducement of a higher good—“ye shall be as gods”—and a pressure applied to the more emotional of the pair. And while the real agent is thus identified with Satan, I see—in accordance with a narrative which described all as it appeared—no fair mode of escaping from the recognition of the actual objective appearance of a serpent, chosen for the reason suggested in the narrative, the subtlety of the movement that comes and goes so stealthily and so unexpectedly, and the association thereby awakened. The one grave objection, that this is the concession of a miraculous transaction for the purpose of deception, is perhaps sufficiently answered by saying that to them it was no miracle,—for there was no adequate knowledge of a settled course of nature,—but an ordinary phenomenon.

Striking confirmation is found in the ancient and widespread traditions of the East, pointing definitely to precisely such a transaction. We not only find the sacred tree that gave immortality—the Indian Kalpankham, the Persian Hom, the Arab Tuba, the Greek Lotus, the tree in the coffin at Warka, and Babylon named “the place of the tree of life;” we also find the ruin of the race connected with the eating from a tree, in the Edda of the north, in the Zendavesta, and in the legend of Thibet, and a deceiver also appears, who is in some cases the serpent. Indeed the serpent figures largely in traditions, in Egypt, Chaldea, Persia, Phœnicia and elsewhere, as the enemy of the gods. The confirmation becomes more definite and singular still. We find not only a Babylonian cylinder of the 9th century n.c. showing the sacred tree with attendant figures and eagle-headed guardians, and another cylinder showing the sacred tree with “attendant Cherubim;” but we find another early Babylonian cylinder with sacred tree showing fruit, a seated human figure on each side, each with a hand extended toward it, and a serpent behind the one whose hand is nearest to the fruit. S. C. B.

1-6. Temptation is now presented to the occupants of Eden. Temptation is not sin, but it seems to be implied in the very nature of man’s probation. Here have we the first allusion which, like a hinge or link, connects the history of our race with events which occurred before man was made—a connection which subsists now, and is to continue, in one form or another, when this world is consumed—so binding forever, past, present, and future events of Providence, into one vast and endless system, ever revolving and unfolding. Sin existed in the universe before it blighted Eden. Some of the angels kept not their first estate; and revelation positively instructs us that man’s apostasy, man’s redemption, and man’s final destiny, have direct relations to the history of those who fell from heaven before man was fashioned out of the dust. W. Adams.

The characters in this high tragedy are all worthy the grandeur of the occasion. They are Jehovah; a fallen rebel of the spiritual universe; and man, a spirit, in the image of God, combined with a physical body. The test act of the occasion, too—however men of low conceptions have sneered at it—was equal to the character of the parties in grandeur and dignity. It was indeed the simple taste of fruit; but that tasting a high, solemn, sacramental act. It was not simply the eating of fruit, but the touching of the sacramental tree. S. R.

1. The serpent is here called a beast of the field; that is, neither a domesticated animal nor one of the smaller sorts. The Lord God had made it, and therefore it was a creature called into being on the same day with Adam. It is not the wisdom, but the wiliness of the serpent which is here noted. M.—The serpent, as a creature of God, has in itself nothing devilish. The real tempter could not be an animal, but only a higher evil spirit, the devil, who made use of the animal as his instrument. There is no mention in Scripture of any personal bodily manifestation of this evil spirit, and it is altogether impossible. Accordingly, he was obliged to speak through the medium of the serpent. Gerl.—In whatever form appearing, in whatever manner addressing the woman, the real tempter—as elsewhere abundantly declared in scripture—was a spiritual being, already fallen, called here and elsewhere the Serpent, from his insidiousness; called also the Devil, as he is a slanderer and calumniator; called also Satan, as he is the hater and the adversary; called also the Wicked One, as pre-eminent among creatures for his infamous moral character. S. R.

That the real personal devil was there, the responsible agent, is surely implied by our Lord (Jno. 8:44). In 2 Cor. 11:3, Paul gives us a plain, historic version of this narrative. But Satan is perhaps most sharply identified in the descriptive points made by John (Rev. 12:9 and 20:2). Our Lord, as also Paul and John, saw in this narrative a real Satan, and also the veritable serpent made his instrument. That Satan should use such an instrument is manifestly within and not beyond his power. It has in certain points its analogy in the demoniacal possessions recorded by the Evangelists. As to power he is spoken of as the god and prince of this world, “the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.” H. C.—There is but one “devil and his angels.” In Rev. 12:9, we read of the great dragon: “that old serpent, the devil and Satan.” In this form he seduced our first parents, and effected the ruin of mankind in their original head. From that period his empire on earth commences, as erected in rebellion against the kingdom of God and his Christ; an empire composed of ignorance, idolatry, impiety, cruelty, and vice; alienation from God, and disobedience to his holy will and law; these are the ingredients and principles of Satan’s empire in the world. R. Hall.

It is with no cloudy vagueness that the personal existence of the spirit of evil is revealed in Holy Scripture. In history, prophecy and in parable is the Tempter brought before us, and every quality, every action, every attribute which can indicate personality is referred to him in language which cannot be explained away. The records of the old dispensation and the writings of the new, alike depict him as pre-eminent in power among the angels who lost their first estate, and as ever compassing the destruction of the souls of men. We, then, are neither wise nor prudent to talk of allegories, or rhetorical personification, or in bolder unbelief to doubt or deny the existence and the power of the chief of the fallen spirits. It were far wiser to recognize our foe, and to seek the strength with which to contend with him. Perry.—The devil’s hatred of us bears date with our very being, and his opposition is as early as his hatred; it is of too active a virulence to lie still and dormant, without putting forth itself in all the actings of a mischievous hostility. The devil hates and maligns us for the privileges of our creation, but much more for the mercies of our redemption: and as soon as ever we list ourselves in the service of the great Captain of our salvation, he bids present defiance to us and proclaims perpetual war against us; which he will never be wanting to carry on with all the force, art, and industry that malice, bounded within the limits of created power, can reach unto. South.—His great business is to draw and drive others to sin; and therefore, as God is “the holy one,” so Satan is called “the wicked one.” The devil may fitly be called “the evil one,” for he is the oldest sinner (1 John 3:8); the greatest sinner (Eph. 6:12); the father of sin (John 8:44). So all the sins in the world are by this furtherance, both actual and original. Again, he hath a great stroke in temptation, that he is the artificer, the designer, the improver of them; therefore he is called “the tempter” (Matt. 4:3). Manton.—Had our first parents actually considered the nearness of God to them when they were tempted to eat of the forbidden fruit, they had not probably so easily been overcome by the temptation. Let us consider that God is as near to observe us as the devil to solicit us; yea, nearer. The devil stands by us, but God is in us. We may have a thought the devil knows not, but not a thought but God is actually present with, as our souls are with the thoughts they think; nor can any creature attract our hearts, if our minds were fixed on that invisible presence that contributes to that excellency and sustains it, and considered that no creature could be so present with us as the Creator is. Charnock.

Without temptation Adam would not have fallen; without temptation you and I would not have fallen. But without temptation would any have risen? What would character be without temptation? The revelations of God, and the great redemption of God, with all its accessories, are for the sake of character. Character is treasure laid up in heaven; character is salvation; character is life eternal. And character is in the heart just what intellect is in the mind, and muscle in the body; it is moral stamina, ethical toughness, and nothing toughens but discipline; and discipline means trial, strain, temptation. Therefore we will ever remember that life is a training-school; that its appliances are arranged with reference to the establishment within us of that which is undecaying, and which we may carry over with us into the vast life we are so rapidly entering. We will try and not repine at the warfare we have so constantly to wage against the evil that is within us and without us. Every thorn in the flesh and in the heart, we will remember, has in it a gracious purpose; is pressed by a divine hand and nicely adjusted to our endurance; that there is nothing in life so corrupt that it need defile us, nothing in experience so heavy that it need crush us. Only we will remember that it is not safe for us to go into our wildernesses alone, but like Jesus, who entered there in the power of the Spirit. Under the stress of trial and difficulty of any kind it is only God’s grace that is sufficient for us, and in that grace will we find our security. C. H. P.

Hath God said? No startling proposal of disobedience is made, no advice, no persuasion to partake of the fruit is employed. The suggestion or assertion of the false only is plainly offered; and the bewildered mind is left to draw its own false inferences, and pursue its own misguided course. The tempter addresses the woman as the more susceptible and unguarded of the two creatures he would betray. M.—It is good to leave off learning where God hath left off teaching; for they which have an ear where God hath no tongue, hearken not unto God, but to the tempter, as Eve did to the serpent. H. Smith.

The mode of approach, and the method of the temptation of an intelligent, sinless creature, is worthy the genius of the tempter for subtlety. A blunt, outspoken attack on the covenant would have repelled his victim. So most adroitly, under form of an undisputed truth, he insinuates an enormous lie. Observe the form of his statement: “Yea hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree.” This was what God said—and also it was not what God said. Observe, God had said, “of every tree,” etc. In that form, the language conveys the idea of generous and almost unlimited freedom. But, as stated by the tempter—while grammatically true—yet it insinuates and is really to the effect, that a tyrannical and useless restraint has been laid upon man. S. R.—Satan here states the exception, as if it had been the rule, and converts a general privilege, with one solitary exception, into an absolute prohibition. And such is ever the treacherous plan of the seducer from the paths of innocence. His grand object is to render, obedience wearisome and constrained; and to this end he conceals every privilege and magnifies every restraint, that he may alienate our affections from the laws of holiness, and from the friends of virtue and of our true happiness. Hifferman.

With apparently full reverence for God, he injects into the mind of Eve a doubt as to this command. If God has certainly spoken, he urges, obey; but has He certainly spoken? It is only a doubt; Satan does not deny that God has spoken. He denies nothing, he affirms nothing; he simply questions. Bryan.—He insinuates into Eve’s mind thoughts that God rather envied than designed their happiness, in forbidding them to eat of that one tree. Despair, which is the greatest instrument next to that of presumption, by which the devil draws men headlong into the fatal net of perdition, how and by what means does he cause it? Why, by representing God to the soul as a tyrant and a tormentor, rigid and implacable, exacting the utmost farthing from a poor bankrupt creature, that is nor worth it. By such diabolical rhetoric does he libel God to the hearts of His creatures. And he well knows that by these arts he does his business effectually; forasmuch as it is impossible for the soul to love God, as long as it takes Him for an enemy and a destroyer. South.

Paradise was made for man, yet there I see the serpent. What marvel is it if my corruption find the serpent in my closet, in my table, when our holy parents found him in the midst of paradise! No sooner he is entered but he tempteth: he can no more be idle than harmless. I do not see him at any other tree; he knew there was no danger in the rest; I see him at the tree forbidden. How true a serpent is he in every point! in his insinuation to the place, in his choice of the tree, in his assault of the woman, in his plausibleness of speech to avoid terror, in his question to move doubt, in his reply to work distrust, in his protestation of safety, in his suggestion to envy and discontent, in his promise of gain! Bp. H.—Balaam could not curse Israel, but he could tempt Israel. The game which Satan had to play was to draw our first parents to sin, and so to separate between them and their God. Thus the Devil was, from the beginning, a murderer and the great mischief-maker. The whole race of mankind had here, as it were, but one neck, and at that Satan struck. The adversary and enemy is that wicked one. H.

2. We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden.** The first assault of the insidious tempter is well sustained by the woman. He insinuates that they had been forbidden the use of every tree without exception. No, says the woman, it is not a prohibition of every tree. The Creator has allowed us the use of all the trees, with one exception. We may not eat of the tree in the midst of the garden. Bush.

—3. Lest ye die. Yet her reply was tainted with doubt. The threat, “Ye shall surely die,” she rendered by the words, “lest ye die.” God’s verily was to her only a perhaps, and the death penalty was a risk and not a certainty. Here was the first sin—not the overt act, not the defiance of God’s authority, but the doubt as to a clearly-revealed command of God—questioning hesitancy in the place of prompt obedience. Bryan.

4. Ye shall not surely die. As before he called in question God’s kindness to man, so does he here deny God’s veracity or truth; and deserves the character which our Saviour gives him, of “a liar.” Kidder.—Unbelief is not only a great sin of itself, but one great cause of all other sins. It may be truly called the Mother of sin, as the devil is the Father: for it was that which by his instigation brought forth sin at first into the world; and it is that which still maintains and keeps it. When the old serpent assaulted our first parents, the first attack he made was upon their faith; and when that was once shaken, he soon overcame them. Beveridge.

5. For God doth know. The first accuser that ever was in the world was a false accuser; and that was the devil. The first false report he raised was of the Most High: unjustly accusing God Himself unto our mother Eve, in a few words, of no fewer than three great crimes at once, Falsehood, Tyranny, and Esuiy. He was then a slanderous accuser of his Maker; and he hath continued ever since a malicious accuser of his brethren. Sanderson.—Thus still the Devil draws people into his interest by suggesting to them hard thoughts of God, and false hopes of benefit and advantage by sin. In opposition to him, always think well of God as the best good, and think ill of sin as the worst of evils: thus resist the Devil, and he will flee from us. H.

The offered suggestion was “that he should be like unto God” in this, “Knowing good and evil.” Being in his creation invested with sovereignty of all inferior creatures, he was not needy of power or dominion. But being a spirit newly inclosed in a body of earth, he was fitted to be allured with appetite of light and liberty of knowledge. Bacon.

Satan is cunning and we are weak, and he will be too hard for us if he do but find us at all staggering in our resolutions to do nothing but what is lawful; or lending an ear to any persuasions for the doing of anything that is unlawful. By this very means he overcame our first mother Eve; and prevailed with her to taste of the forbidden fruit, though it were unlawful, by persuading her that it was expedient. To a Christian that desireth to make conscience of his ways, nothing can be truly expedient that he knows to be unlawful. Sanderson.—Satan gains our souls step by step; and his first allurement is the knowledge of what is wrong. He first tempts to the knowledge, and then to the commission of sin. Depend on it that our happiness and our glory in these matters is to be ignorant, as well as to be guiltless. Oh, thoughtless, and worse, cruel to your own selves, all ye who read what ye should not read, and hear what ye should not hear! How will you repent of your folly afterward! How will you despise yourselves, how weep at what you have brought on you! At this day surely there is a special need of this warning; for this is a day when nothing is not pried into, nothing is not published, nothing is not laid before all men. Newman.

6. Good for food, delight to the eyes, to be desired to make one wise. The threefold appeal of the tempter to the infirmities of our nature may be traced also in the temptation of Christ, the second Adam, who “was in all points likewise tempted, but without sin.” P. S.—There is a noteworthy parallelism between the Temptation which Christ surmounted in the desert and this under which our first parents succumbed in the garden. “When the woman saw” (“through false spectacles of Satan’s making,” as Jackson adds) “that the tree was good for food” (the solicitation of the flesh), “and that it was pleasant to the eyes” (the solicitation of the world), “and a tree to be desired to make one wise” (the solicitation of the devil), “she took of the fruit thereof and did eat.” In that first sin were the lineaments of every other sin, as in Christ’s victory over temptation the lineaments, and very much more than the lineaments, of every other victory. Trench

Of the three reasons assigned for eating, each one centres on self, and not one refers, even remotely, to the divine command, and in each of them is there a striking resemblance to the reasons by which men to-day seek to legitimate sin. Thus, the tree was “Good for food.” Practical unbelief makes food an ultimate necessity, and connects life with the natural appetite instead of with God through the natural appetite. We must have bread, say these; and what brings us bread is thereby justified. “Pleasant to the eyes.” “Beauty for beauty’s sake,” cry the athletes, and very impatiently do they resent all moral tests, owning allegiance to an artistic standard alone. Yet beauty cannot rival duty. The word of God must regulate art as it regulates our bread. Immoral beauty is sin, however beautiful it be: and the beauty cannot hide the sin or shield the sinner. “To be desired to make one wise.” As in Eve’s case, knowledge is often the loss of power; for, while Eve knew good and evil, it was at the cost of her life. She knew evil by becoming evil. So knowledge is not always a blessing. Its value depends on its source. If it is from God, it is power; if from Satan, it is moral impotence and ruin. He is not best that knows most, but he that knows most from God. . . . Here is the genesis of human sin: Doubt, Unbelief, Gratification—each the step to the next. There could have been no gratification without unbelief, and no unbelief without doubt. Bryan.

Doubt is awakened whether what God has commanded is really good, and along with this the command itself is exaggerated. Distrust of God was called up, as if He were an envious being who sought to keep man back in a lower stage; and then ver. 4 proceeds to a decided denial of God’s word. Only then, when selfishness, rebelling against God’s will and God’s word, has been awakened, does sensuous allurement, ver. 6, exert its power. In other words, the real principle of sin is, according to the Old Testament, unbelief of the divine word, the selfish elevation of self-will above the divine will, and the presumptuous trampling upon the limits set by divine command. The senses appear as occupying only a secondary place in the production of sin. Thus Gen. 3 disproves the doctrine so often advanced, especially in the Rabbinical theology, that according to the Old Testament the real principle of evil lies in matter, in the body. It is a fundamental doctrine of the Old Testament that evil is originally the denial of the divine will; that sin is sin because man selfishly exalts himself above God and His will. The Old Testament knows of no evil which is merely men’s wronging of each other, or a mere retardation of the development of human nature, simple weakness. O.

As regards the origin of sin we are not aware that all the philosophic discussions of the world together ever advanced beyond the condensed and inimitable formula of the apostle James: “God cannot be tempted with evil; neither tempteth he any man; but every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.” Sin originated in no compulsion, no inducement, on the part of God. It is not an accident, or effect of matter. It had its origin in the free-will of man. Involuntary suggestion, the thought, the imagination of the act interdicted, was not sin; but the entertainment of that imagination, the cherishing of that desire, the accomplishing of that thought—this is sin. Such is the sequence in this actual history. She looked—she saw that the fruit was pleasant to the eye, and good for food; desire was enkindled, was cherished: and this, when it conceived, brought forth sin; and sin, when completed in act, brought forth death. All the metaphysics of centuries, whole libraries of discussion, concerning the origin and nature of sin, condensed together, add nothing to this concise statement of historic events. W. Adams.

God does not subject us to temptation, that, through sinning, we may illustrate his grace. Trials as tests of our choice of good or evil, of our faith in himself, of our love and devotion, he does appoint for our moral discipline and culture; but temptations that look toward sin and lead to sin, are the prompting of our own desires, when these are loosed from the control of reason and conscience. The sin does not lie in the fact of temptation, nor in the susceptibility to temptation: but when we suffer our susceptibilities to natural good to be wrought upon to such a degree that they entice us to forget reason, conscience, duty to God; when these over-stimulated desires come to a head in the decision of the will to gratify them,—then do they bring forth sin. The counteractive to such temptation is a just conception of our highest good as in God, and from him; a patient, prayerful, unwavering trust in him; and the keeping his word in our hearts as our law and guide. J. P. T.

Our own experience has made us familiar with the genesis and progress of sin: we have fallen a thousand times before the very craft, the very device, by which our first parents were ensnared. The desires and lusts which haunt the senses, and the understanding which holds by sense, demand an excessive unlawful gratification. At first reason and conscience withstand the claim. The repulse only whets desire and makes the craving lust more vehement. They return to the attack. If again withstood, they return again, perhaps under some new disguise, always with new force; till at last the resistance of reason and conscience is overcome, and some pretext is found for yielding to the clamorous desire. We have been “drawn aside of lust, and enticed;” in us “lust has conceived, and brought forth sin.” The edge and strictness of our scruples have been worn down; the force of high spiritual resolves has been frittered away; the charm of things pleasant to the eye, though not good for food, has grown upon us till we have “consented to sin.” We know that every time we yield to temptation we become an easier prey to the wiles of evil; that every hour we neglect or postpone a duty we harden into a more habitual neglect. Do we know it? Let us then listen to the warning: “Take heed lest any of you be hardened by the deceitfulness of his sin;” “lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve by his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity and purity that are in Christ.” Cox.

The Biblical narrative depicts the sin of our first parents as the result of a temptation which came upon man, and was the cause of his fall, thus intimating the existence of a seducing spiritual power external to man—a view subsequently attaining a more developed doctrinal form, and made of prominent importance in the New Testament. Against no other doctrine, however, is modern consciousness more prejudiced than this. And yet it is the interest of mankind to regard man as tempted, and not as the inventor and first author of sin. Man is not in harmony with sin: he is not Satanic. If he were so, if he had been the originator of sin, he would be incapable of redemption. Sin has not so much proceeded from him as entered into him—a fact which, while it does not extenuate his guilt, alleviates its consequences. Luthardt.—If the sin of the human race rests on a free act of its first parents, that could not be the first cause of it. It must have some other ground. If the thought of breaking loose from God had arisen in their own minds, they would have set themselves against God in their own deep selfishness; evil would not be something foreign to man; man would be evil himself; he would have satanized himself. Just because man is not a devil, must there be a devil. Evil in its human form, where it leaves room for redemption, is to be explained only by temptation. Thus the two ideas at which the natural mind most readily stumbles, the ideas of hereditary sin and of the devil, are manifestly the saviours of the true dignity of man.

As the origin of evil in man can only be explained as Genesis does it, by a free act which establishes his guilt and by temptation which makes redemption a possibility, so the Mosaic narrative describes its nature in a way which is self-evidently true. The first act is, that the tempter seeks to loosen the bands of childlike trust which bound man to God by casting suspicion on the eternal love; that he sows first unbelief and then disobedience in the heart of man. To the first suggestion, which does not at once succeed, the tempter gives weight by a second. He drops into their minds the poison of self-exaltation, by asserting that they would rise from their position of dependence and become as God, knowing good and evil. In denying the threatening of death Satan cunningly weaves together truth and falsehood. It is truly the will of God and our destiny, created as we are in the image of God, that we shall become like God. But man has to pass through a course of development under the hand of God to reach this end. Only as a reward for a life of willing subjection and active obedience to God can the free creature receive the crown of eternal life. But the tempter says: “You need only to act and to know yourselves, to live according to your own will; then are ye as God.” He perverts the fact of being in the image of God into the deification of self, and pushes the idea of the creature and of obligation aside. Self-seeking, which, putting God aside, makes God of self and makes self the centre of all things, is the second element in the nature of sin. A third makes its appearance in Eve herself. This is desire, love of the world, gratification of the senses. The testing command had this meaning. The tree had no importance in itself. It was of account merely as a means of exercising freedom. This its name tells us. Now, however, this forbidden tree acquires a greater charm than all the unforbidden ones. God has lost reality in her mind and the tree seems to the senses so sweet. The senses obtain the mastery and sin is committed. The flesh has obtained the victory, the true order of life is inverted. All the higher powers have forsaken God, their true ground and rest, the lower powers become dominant. That these three parts of the idea of sin substantially express and exhaust it, is shown not only in the fact that all sin that comes before us in life may be referred to them, but also in the fact that they correspond to the three fundamental elements of man’s consciousness, God-consciousness, self-consciousness, and world-consciousness. These have all become corrupted and perverted. They have become respectively alienation from God, selfishness, love of the world. Man has become physical and fleshly. Unbelief is the negative, the union of self-seeking and the lust of the senses the positive element in the idea of sin. Man no longer wishes for God; he is bent on having the creature in both ways—the mental and natural, the subjective and objective; he will have his own self and the world too. According to Genesis, the selfishness is the soul, sensuousness the body of sin. The first is the deep, invisible root, the second the external manifestation. The self, separated from God, seeks in the world the elements on which it lives. Redemption opposes faith to unbelief, love to selfishness, the hope of a new world to the lust of this world. Auberien.

Angelic spirits, having been brought into being without dependence upon each other, were placed each for himself upon independent, personal probation, and each stood or fell by his own personal obedience; but we, having been brought into the world by a necessary connection with each other, were put upon trial in the first of our species, who just as effectually evinced what human nature would do as though that nature had been tested in all its possessors. Thornwell.

God might have created a universe ruled from first to last by physical law, and so incapable of deviation from the true rule of its action. In such a universe moral evil would have found no place, only because there would have been no creatures properly capable of moral good. Our experience tells us that God has not chosen to stint down His creative activity to these proportions; that we are free agents is not more a matter of faith than experience. We know that God has created beings whose high privilege it is to be able freely to choose Him as their King, as the accepted Master of their whole inward life. But if this privilege is to be real, it also carries with it the implied power of rejecting Him. The alternative risk is the inevitable condition of the consummate honor; it is actually a substantial part of the honor. A moral being must at least have a capacity for disobedience if he is to be able freely to obey. H. P. L.—There is no morality or immorality where there is no choice or freedom: consequently were the actions of men under an absolute control, they would no more be answerable for their doings than a clock is for its motions: and therefore to call on God to make all things work by immediate interposition of His power, for the present reward of virtue and punishment of vice, is a request not consistent with itself; it is desiring God to do that for the sake of virtue, which would destroy virtue and leave no room for the exercise of it, no ground on which to distinguish it from vice and iniquity. Sherlock.

Having placed him in a state of probation, surrounded by motives of which some induced to obedience and some to disobedience, but with perfect liberty of choice, an easy duty was enjoined, and the penalty of transgression laid before him His Maker set life and death before him, and left it to his own unforced volition which to choose. Had Omnipotence interposed in these circumstances and exercised a supernatural influence upon man’s freedom of will to prevent his sin, He had thereby destroyed the foundation of all the merit of obedience, and put it out of His power to make any trial of him at all. It would have been to govern him not as a free, but as a necessary agent, and any reward for his conduct would in that case have been as absurd as to reward the sun for shining, or the rivers for running into the ocean. Man therefore fell not by any inevitable necessity, but by the abuse of his free agency; and to say that God did not interpose to prevent it, is merely to say that he did not see fit to do violence to the moral nature of the being he formed, but left it to be influenced according to the laws to which he had made it subject. Bush.

In neglecting the tree of life which he was allowed to eat of, and eating of the tree of knowledge which was forbidden, he plainly showed a contempt of the favors God had bestowed on him, and a preference given to those God did not see fit for him. He would be both his own carver and his own master; would have what he pleased, and do what he pleased: his sin was, in one word, disobedience; disobedience to a plain, easy, and express command, which he knew to be a command of trial. He sins against great knowledge, against many mercies, against light and love, the clearest light and the dearest love that ever sinner sinned against. He had no corrupt nature within him to betray him; but had a freedom of will, not enslaved, and was in his full strength, not weakened or impaired. H.—The temptation assails him to be as God, i.e., independent—his own master. In this consists, according to the Scripture narrative, the essence, the real character of the first sin, the origin of all after sin of mankind. The desire to eat of the forbidden fruit follows on the inward alienation from God; and so, while the sin was in its real character and origin so great and fearful, its outward form, the act of eating of the forbidden fruit, has the character of a childlike disobedience—in accordance with man’s condition—though even then we must not attempt to extenuate the nature of the sin. The form which man’s sin assumes—nay, every object of the inward evil desire—is always belonging to the flesh or the world; but its soul, even in its coarsest form of sensuality, is always—self-exaltation. Gerl.

The fact of original sin presents nothing strange, nothing obscure; it consists essentially in disobedience to the will of God, which will is the moral law of man. This disobedience, the sin of Adam, is an act committed everywhere and every day, arising from the same causes, marked by the same characters, and attended by the same consequences as the Christian dogma assigns to it. At the present day, as in the Garden of Eden, this act is occasioned by a thirst for absolute independence, the ambitious aspirings of curiosity and pride, or weakness in the face of temptation. Guizot.

I believe, that God created man in his own image, in a reasonable soul, in innocency, in free-will, and in sovereignty; that he gave him a law and commandment which was in his power to keep, but he kept it not; that man made a total defection from God, presuming to imagine that the commandments and prohibitions of God were not the rules of good and evil, but that good and evil had their own principles and beginnings, and lusted after the knowledge of those imagined beginnings; to the end to depend no more upon God’s will revealed, but upon himself and his own light, as a god; than the which there could not be a sin more opposite to the whole law of God: that yet, nevertheless, this great sin was not originally moved by the malice of man, but was insinuated by the suggestion and instigation of the devil, who was the first defected creature, and fell of malice and not by temptation. Bacon.

She took, and did eat; and gave unto her husband, and he did eat. Man’s first probation terminated disastrously. That tree which, because of the divine interdict, had been avoided—which had been the test of obedience—through the subtleties of diabolic solicitation, was approached, and the fruit thereof was eaten. The tempter was believed more than God. The desire of self-control, distrust and independence of the Creator, and palpable infringement of his well-known will, were the ripened form and spirit of sin. The bright and happy auspices of the first probation availed nothing; and, notwithstanding circumstances most propitious in aid of obedience, sin entered the world, with all its entailment of woe! W. Adams.

The one act was a violation of the whole law (James 2:10)—a rejection of the authority of God; and their conduct, instead of being less culpable owing to the unimportance of the special act prohibited, as rationalists would represent, was on that very account only the more aggravated. It reduced the actual transgressors, and, as the subsequent history proves, all their posterity, into the condition of sinners. Sin is not here mentioned by name, but taking it according to the Scriptural definition as “the transgression of the law,” it certainly appears in a form which justifies the Pauline statement: “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Rom. 5:12). The confidence which the parents of mankind had previously reposed in God and the mutual love which they cherished, all at once gave way to distrust, and to recriminations of God and of one another. Shame, fear of God, and mutual estrangement were the feelings which predominated immediately after their transgression, and these plainly declared that they had incurred the penalty against which they had been warned. They were fully conscious that they had forfeited God’s favor, in which is life (Ps. 30:5), and had become obnoxious to his displeasure—a state which Scripture designates as “death.” D. M.

The eyes of both were opened. Both morally and physically they saw before. Morally they saw truth in all its beauty; physically, they saw Eden in all its glory. But they saw now what they never expected to see, and felt what they never expected to feel. They have now the experimental knowledge of good and evil. They felt the remorse which succeeds ever the consciousness of sin. They are bereaved of the comfortable presence of their Maker. The eyes of their mind are opened to the consequences of sin. It is the brief and beautiful expression for that which, in all ages since, to every son of Adam, occurs in one or other degree after a fearful transgression. The fascination of crime loses its spell of enchantment over the soul as soon as the crime is committed, and the terrible experience of millions is herein truly uttered: “Their eyes were opened.” The peculiar law of the human soul has furnished the theme in chief for tragedy in every age. S. R.—It did not make them know good and evil altogether, as God knows it, but in an experimental sense, as the devil knows it. In point of knowledge, they became like God; in point of morality, like the tempter. M.—The trial and decision of man, but not his fall and rebellion, were necessary. As the tempter had deceitfully promised, man’s eyes were opened; but he only saw his nakedness. He knew what was good, but by the dreadful consciousness of having lost it; he knew what was evil, but in painful experience of the wretchedness which now had become his.

He became as God, from having been his representative, he had assumed an independent position. He had constituted himself a god, he had become his own master; but this likeness to God made him exceedingly wretched and poor, instead of rendering him happy. By yielding to the will of the tempter, and rebelling against that of God, man became subject to sin and to death, which is the wages of sin. K.

Individual life is an analogue of the dispensation which rules the history of the race. There are crises in the history of each of us—points at which a determinate direction is given to the character, whether intellectual or moral. The will stands face to face with some great question of duty; we debate it; we meditate; there is an earnest and bitter conflict—an agony; the issue gives a tremendous impulse one way or the other! This is pre-eminently the case with religion. The law stands face to face with us; the Spirit stimulates conscience; we struggle; we resist; we evade; matters are finally brought to a crisis—we must decide, and often that decision is final! Oh, the importance of having every decision right! Thornwell.

Pride whispers that by treading the path of sin we shall climb to the most desirable heights; sensuality discovers the beautiful in all forbidden fruit; we forget everything except the claim of lust, and, like our first parents, we give to each other the apple of death. But erelong we, like them, have the bandage torn from our eyes, and it appears what bitter truth the tempter spoke in the misleading declaration: “In the day when ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened.” Alas, what a fearful difference between the light in which the sin appears an hour after and a day before it was committed! V. in. O.—Worldly fathers and despairing mothers take what comfort they can from the easy maxim that young people had better have a free range through scenes of temptation, in order that its attractions may not take them by surprise further on, and that they must “see life,” to know how to live. If we could lead out in our time the hopeless profligates of a single generation which that plausible philosophy has betrayed, the joyous households, once pure, that it has wrecked and distracted, the sweet, clean hearts it has defiled, the noble natures it has degraded, the men whose honor it has ruined, and the women whose peace it has crushed,—a very long, a very mournful, and a very admonitory procession it would be. At the head of it move the first human pair, marching in miserable humiliation out of Eden. The tree of the knowledge of “good” was not enough. There hung, in ruddy beauty, the more luscious fruit of the knowledge of “evil” as well. Why not eat of that? Knowledge can do no harm. Seeing things as they are! Nature is a safe study. “Thou shalt not surely die.” Six thousand years the story has been told over and over. You need not go for it to the beginning of Genesis. It was acted last night close to where you live,—happy for you if not by some soul that you love. Indiscriminate knowledge, unhallowed curiosity, the lust of the mind looking through eager eyes, is the unceasing temptation of man. So he falls first into sin, then into shame. “Seeing life” turns out to be tasting of death. F. D. H.

This, of course, is to be taken in a spiritual sense, for, in anything short of a high typical sense this was not now first true. This is no allegorical sense put upon the words here to serve a purpose; it is the interpretation which accords with the usage of Scripture elsewhere. Thus “Moses saw that by erecting the golden calf Aaron had made the people naked.” So Ahaz, by his sinful course, “made Judah naked”—that is, exposed to the wrath of God. S. R.—Then did they feel with what grace they were clothed when, though naked, they were the slaves of no unseemly desires. In their hastening to make an apron of fig-leaves, they appear to have been moved by some mysterious impulse, and to have adopted unwittingly this sign of their punishment—a conviction of sinfulness to themselves. Aug.

As the language in ch. 2 : 25 is an expression of purity and peace of mind, so the language used here is the expression of conscious guilt, of self-condemnation and shame. It was the transgression of the divine command that wrought the change. As obedience was the conscious recognition of the divine authority, and the condition of continued connection with the source of spiritual life and peace, so their disobedience was the conscious rejection of that authority, and forfeiture of spiritual life and enjoyment. Man’s natural reason, with his appetites and passions, was now in the ascendant; no longer under the control and direction of that spiritual element of his nature, in which he bore the image of God, and lived in happy communion with him. Hence his dread of God, and conscious guilt and shame. T. J. C.—There was no blush in Eden, as there was none in heaven, till sin entered it. That crimson signal of guilt, or offended modesty, betrays the knowledge between good and evil which was first born on earth when transgression invaded

Eden. No reproof, no upbraiding, no sentence, as yet had been uttered by their Maker; but the guilty pair had lost, what they never could regain, ignorance of evil, consciousness of innocence, and they were ashamed. Shame is the first-born progeny of sin.

We may not explain the nature of the transmitted influence which connects our sin with the sin of Adam. It would be of little use to speculate where we cannot know. We sin, and we are accountable for our own sins. To deny the fact that we sin, that all men sin, that all the human race are deficient in the judgment of the law which requires supreme love to God and disinterested love for our fellows, is to for swear the testimony of facts, the whole drift of history, and the positive affirmations of the inspired Word. Yet dimmed and blighted as they are by the consequences of sin, the original faculties of our nature are not destroyed. United to a life which is endless—brought into play in connection with immortality—they make man a being still, little short of divine, in whose presence we are awed—and the moment we suffer ourselves to think lightly or meanly of man’s capacities we lose the last hope of his restoration. The highest proof of man’s greatness and worth, is in what God has done for his recovery. The Scriptures exalt man’s being beyond all which man himself ever conceived; and this always in connection with his moral apostasy. Scriptural assertion and palpable fact are agreed. Man has intelligence, capacity, conscience, and freedom; but he has not obedience. By what test is obedience to be judged? THE REVEALED LAW OF GOD. Another test was prescribed to the first man, even that he should abstain from an interdicted object. The criterion of human character now is this epitome of divine legislation: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” Tried by this rule—and not another—the character of man is defective. Man does not love his maker with all his heart, nor his neighbor as himself. It is a libel on humanity and the perversion of a truth, to affirm that men are as utterly bad as they might be; for besides restraints, social and providential, there are laws, many of which man has himself enacted, the shadows of a greater statute, to which he may be conformed in the practice of all which is generous, honest, and humane; but the testimony of history and Scripture is, that by that divine law which demands the supreme love of the soul to God, the character of the huhuman race is defective. Noble specimens there have been of humanity, especially as redeemed and helped by Christianity; but where and when has there been one, out of all the race, who, in an honest judgment, has obeyed the perfect law of his Maker, without the defection of a thought or the defect of a moment?

Change man’s circumstances as you will—give him a Christian parentage—place before him a godly example—here is something which may be affirmed of the whole species; they do not fulfil the law which demands perfect and supreme love to God and man. The first probation of human nature, on principles of obedience, terminated disastrously; and tried on the same terms, our common nature has been found defective and depraved ever since.

The circumstances of man’s condition correspond somewhat to his character. All sin is not to be ascribed to a vitiated bodily constitution; but the human body is subject to strong and ill-regulated appetences—to pain, disease, and death. Fast as the redemptive help is applied to the world, man’s physical condition improves; but it were nothing but delusion to affirm that his condition now is what it would have been if sin had not shadowed the earth. It was not misanthropy, but inspired truth, which affirmed that man was born to trouble as sparks fly upward. Innumerable compensations, mitigations, and mercies remain, but every man who is born into this world comes in contact with evils which do not belong to a state of sinless innocence. Sufferings and sorrows, not to speak of wrongs, oppressions, and wars, remind us that we live in a world on which rests the curse of sin, and which is filled with the penalties of transgression. W. Adams.

The creation of the first human pair was the creation of a race. In God’s eternal thought, which Augustine calls the divine idea, or the primal type, the genus precedes the individual. Or, as Edwards puts it, taking the figure from Stapfer, Adam was the root and humanity the tree; so that the sin of Adam was the fall of man. Or, as Paul has it, “by one man’s disobedience, the many were made sinners.” And this is the proper beginning of human history. It begins in sin. Sin in the root carries sin into all the branches; not, indeed, as a necessity of fate, else it could be no longer sin, but yet as a perfect certainty of history. As is the root, so are the branches; as in the oak, so in the man. In the man a mystery—but so also in the oak. A mystery, because a life. Only in man the mystery is deeper, because the life is deeper.

Choice there must be, to have it sin; but the choice is beyond and beneath our scrutiny. Adam fell into sin; we are born to it. We choose it, indeed; but it is our first choice. But now, besides sin, we have grace also in the problem. Both are inexplicable. Sin is a mystery, which human speculation has never fathomed. Grace is a mystery, into which the angels desire to look. What relief we need, in our perplexed and painful meditations upon human life, may be had by putting the two together, face to face. R. D. H.

The lessons of Scripture, while leaving the entrance of evil in its awful mystery, assist our faith by showing first that nothing derogatory to God could be implied in its introduction, and then that God dealing with it as a fact has overruled it for his own glory. The shadow which the entrance of evil casts on God redemption rolls away. It was not for want of power in God that sin entered, for in Christ he defeats it. It was not for want of righteousness, for redemption is one continued death-blow to sin’s dominion. It was not for want of wisdom, for the wisdom that cures is higher than the wisdom that was required to prevent. It was not for want of love, for the love that provided the second Adam to humanity could not have been wanting in the trial of the first. There is thus a reply on Calvary to the vexing thoughts that cluster around Eden, and while the mystery remains it loses its terror. And further, the undoubted outburst of the glory of God on the darkened theatre of sin, though we dare not say that the theatre was darkened for the purpose, assists our faith in God. It has been conclusively shown that evil can be overruled for good, that attributes of God are brought out that might otherwise have slumbered, and emotions called forth in his creatures which without danger and deliverance would have been impossible. Where sin abounded grace has much more abounded. God has become more glorious in his dealings with sin for its expulsion; saved sinners more blessed, angels more instructed and confirmed. Cairns.

As the fall of man, through the marvellous plan of redemption, has brought greater good to man and higher glory to God, so has it also given to our human melodies greater depth and compass, that we may fitly sing and celebrate this noble triumph. Then was introduced that solemn but sweet minor which unlocks the fountain of tears, and which has carried so much of contrite prayer upward to heaven, till, like that weeping mist that went up to water Eden, it descends again in soft and fertilizing dews. Ker.

8. And they heard the voice of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God amongst the trees of the garden. And the LORD God called unto the man, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat. And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, cursed art thou above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

18 thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; 19 in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

God was not alienated from man when man was alienated from him. The life of humanity was not ended, at once and forever, by the disastrous issue of its first probation. From all which is told us in revelation, we infer that when the fallen angels sinned retribution followed immediately upon transgression. For them was no reprieve, no redemption, no gospel of forgiveness. Mark the difference. When man sinned, though retribution of one kind followed, yet man was spared. The curtain did not drop before this stage of being, nor the life of man go out in darkness. The waves of oblivion did not roll over the world, nor was a new creation evoked to supply its place; but the world continued, the sun shone, the stars kept on in their courses, time waited, and man was placed on a new and different probation. That second probation forms the great body of human history. The first was a mere prelude to the second. This explains why it is that the narrative of the first is so brief and condensed. It is not pertinent or practical to ourselves at all. We are not deciding our destiny on the same probationary terms which were prescribed to man at the beginning. Our immortal blessedness is not pivoted on the contingency of sinless obedience and unsullied innocence. Mercy presides over the second and main probation of our race; and our destiny turns on our relations and dispositions to the means of redemption. A glimpse of coming hope and relief breaks through the gloom of the curse itself. Promise is mingled with the very utterance of displeasure; nor does the cloud which gathered its blackness, and uttered its thunders over the heads of the guilty, discharge its contents, before the bow of hope is painted on its gloom, to gladden their tearful eyes and desponding hearts; nor have they stepped outside the gates of Eden, before the second probation of human nature begins, under the auspices of restorative help. W. Adams.

At the very beginning, under a system of natural religion, Adam was constituted the head and organ of a religious Commonwealth. God entered into a covenant with him, distinctly religious in its character, and which proposed for its end his promotion to the highest spiritual felicity. The tree of knowledge, as the test of man’s obedience, was the appointed symbol of God’s moral government; whilst the mysterious tree of life was the seal of all the blessings which should accrue from a successful probation. In the institution of the Sabbath a more distinct claim was laid upon the homage and worship of the creature. In the language of Lord Bacon, “Man was thus designated as the interpreter and high priest of nature, to gather up its mute praises, to fill them with his own intellect and soul, and to pour the universal song into the ear of Him, whose glory was reflected in them all.” By the force of his position, as the root and representative of all his offspring, he was constituted the prophet, priest, and king of that religious empire. From its origin, the Family, in its idea as it stood before the mind of Jehovah, was THE CHURCH, the temple of his worship.

Equally so after the fall, the first man becomes, in the Family, the minister of the religion of grace. Brief as the history is, it is full of broad suggestions as to the churchly character of the household. Look at the first promise, the seedling in which is implicitly contained the whole of our theology. In its very terms, “the seed of the woman,” it postulates the parent and the Family; and that Family, as embracing the ark, with its mercy-seat and the covering rainbow. Definitely as it points through the ages to Him who should be born of the Virgin, it could be fulfilled, both as a promise and a prophecy, only through the Family, bound together by natural ties, until the fulness of the times. B. M. Palmer.

We find in the Bible a unity of promise concerning the Redemption of man. It was a striking and almost an exceptional feature in Christ as a Teacher, that He did not profess to introduce a new and original system of truth, but came to complete a foregoing Revelation and to finish an appointed work. He confirmed his own doctrine by appealing to Moses and the prophets; and the constant argument of the apostles in their early preaching was that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled, in his person, all the conditions of ancient prophecy and promise. Going back upon this line of promise to the later prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, we find in Malachi and Zechariah, the announcement of the coming Purifier, the Deliverer, the Shepherd, the King, the Redeemer, with various marks of identity, all which were verified in Christ. A century earlier, in Daniel, then afar off at the court of Babylon, we find predictions of the Messiah as a Redeemer, with specifications touching His character and work which were marvellously filled out in Christ. Yet again two centuries farther back, in the prophet Isaiah, we find the most detailed delineation of the Messiah to come as the Child of Hope, as the Comforter of His people, as the suffering Redeemer, as the Prince of Peace. Once more; in the height of the kingdom of Israel, when David had brought the tribes to be united at home and respected abroad, we find in his prophetic Psalms the announcement of a Son before whom he bowed as his Lord, of whom he predicted an everlasting kingdom and victory over death. Then following back the course of ages to Moses, to Jacob, to Abraham, and across the flood up to the very gate of Eden, we find fewer and dimmer, but still legible and unmistakable, the promises of the great Prophet and Lawgiver like unto Moses, of the Shiloh, the Prince of Peace who shall gather the peoples to Himself, of the Seed of Abraham in whom all nations shall be blessed, of the Seed of the woman which shall bruise the serpent’s head.

When we consider the vast intervals of time by which these prophecies are separated one from another, the great variety of circumstances, places and conditions in which they were uttered; in the infancy of the race, and at the moment when sin and death seemed to have destroyed all hope for mankind; in the homeless wanderings of solitary men like Abraham and Jacob, who had nothing to build upon but faith; in the wild encampment of a horde of fugitives just escaped from serfdom into the desert; from the throne of a consolidated kingdom, renowned in arms, favored in foreign alliance, and glorious with the tokens of Jehovah’s presence; amid the dismembered fragments of that same kingdom, and in the exile of the people of God, who sitting by the rivers of Babylon, for very grief could not sing the songs of Zion to their mocking captors; under a foreign rule, and in times of religious decline and social corruption that seemed to render hopeless the idea of reviving and deliverance; when we thus follow through so many and so distant steps, so many and so contrary conditions, these fragmentary prophecies, and find them ever adhering to one type and following one line of development, and pointing to one perfect and glorious consummation, there is nothing in all that science has discovered of the permanence of types, and the unity of plan, and the development of system in the natural world, that can exceed in impression this proof, from the unity of the promise of Redemption, of the finger of God inditing and unfolding the whole. J. P. T.

8. And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.

The sound of the Majestic Presence, or the glory of the Lord, approaching nearer and nearer to the place where they were. Patrick.—The Scripture narrates these things in such wise that we should rather believe that God spake to man in Paradise in the same way as He afterward spake to the Fathers, to Abraham, to Moses, that is, in some bodily form or appearance. Hence is it also that they heard His Voice, as He walked in Paradise at eventide, and hid themselves. Aug.—God held converse with the first men in a visible form, as a Father and Educator of His children, and this was the original mode of the Divine revelation, not coming in for the first time after the fall. Keil.—The Targums here and generally paraphrase the Name of the Most High by “the Word of the LORD,” more especially in those passages where is recorded anything like a visible or sensible representation of his Majesty. The Christian Fathers almost universally believed that every appearance of God to the patriarchs and prophets was a manifestation of the Eternal Son. E. H. B.

Hid themselves. Repulsion from God was the necessary effect of guilt and shame. Man sought to conceal himself from his Maker. An evil conscience invariably begets dislike and dread of God. W. A.—As a child hides himself from a father he has offended, so hid they from him. It was a “voice” they heard. It is clear that the tones of that voice had been of kindness and love. There is no reason to suppose that now that voice was less kind than it had been, for the Lord had not chosen to appear to know their crime but from their own acknowledgment. It was the consciousness of sin that made all the difference—that made the Presence most terrible that had hitherto been hailed with reverent joy and filial confidence. Sin did in them, as it does in all their descendants, create a cold and cheerless distance between the heart and God. Kit.

The tones of that voice had till now been the sweetest to their ear of all the sounds and harmonies of Eden. For, doubtless, he appeared to Adam just as subsequently he oft assumed the shadowy form of humanity to visit Abram or Moses or Joshua. But the consciousness of sin turns all this into an image of horror and dread, while, as yet, no hope of a recovery assures them. And, therefore, they fly into the darkest recesses, in the vain hope of cluding His all-seeing eye. It is this aversion to any real consciousness of God’s presence that forms the most insuperable barrier to the salvation of the sinner. Under this fear from a consciousness of sin, he will not allow the voice of the Lord God to come near, that it may bring him with the sentence of condemnation also the hope of recovery. Here is the secret and the source of the atheism and unbelief of which Christian lands are so full—here is the reason why atheism and unbelief are the products of Christian lands chiefly. The superior moral tone which the gospel infuses into society brings home to men the consequences of their guilt; and the voice of the Lord God in his perpetual ordinances keeps ever alive their fears, so, to avoid it, they encase themselves in unbelief. Only when the soul is brought “to look upon Him pierced,” shall it truly mourn for sin. Under the mere sense of guilt, without hope of pardon, the attempt will always be to screen the soul, not only from the voice of God direct, but from that voice of God also which speaks within through the conscience. S. R.

Not that men can hide themselves from God, but Adam and those that are his by nature will seek to do it, because they do not know him aright. These words therefore show us what a bitter thing sin is to the soul; it is only for hiding-work, sometimes under its fig-leaves, sometimes among the trees of the garden. Oh, what a shaking, starting, timorous conscience is a sinful, guilty conscience! Banyan.

There is that in the very nature of sin which tends to self-disclosure. Sin runs to passion; passion runs to tumult in character; and a tumultuous character tends to reveal itself, so that the world shall see it in its ultimate and finished hideousness. The fear of this is often discoverable in the experience of the guilty, as a distinct element of retributive suffering. It is distinct from the secret consciousness of sin; distinct, also, from any well-defined fear of its consequences. Our souls are so made as to tremble at the thought of detection in itself considered. Such was the working of conscience upon the first guilty pair in Paradise. With a simplicity which could have accompanied none but a first sin, they sought to hide themselves from God. We do not know that anything else than sin would ever have awakened in the human mind that instinct of concealment. It is an instinct that shuts a sinner into the society of his own outraged conscience. He must bear the torture of an invisible Nemesis, alone. This often goads him with the simple dread of detection, till in desperation he goes and forestalls it by confession, to rid himself of the tortorment of anticipating it. The history of human justice abounds with instances of this working of the Law of Conscience. Yet the germ of just such self-disclosure is in every human heart. A. Phelps.

The soul’s fine mechanism is strangely disordered. The original end of its creation is lost. We learn the nature of its structure by the extent and melancholy grandeur of its ruins. The powers that allied it to angels are now known principally by the terror of their movement. Account for the fact as we may, its existence is beyond contradiction. Whatever be our connection with the original apostasy, whatever the nature of the influence that has come down from Adam, be the preponderance of evil on the side of the first transgression, or of the actual personal offence, the fact admits of no qualification or denial. The proofs crowd upon us unceasingly and in broad daylight. They are within us and about us. The consciousness of every moment has a tongue, every wind of heaven has its sad voices. History, with its unbroken chapters of blood and crime, only confirms what we hourly see and every moment feel. B. B. Edwards.

9. The Lord God called unto Adam.** Emphatically called JEROVAN ELOHIM, God the Lord. By which, in the language of Philo, according to the opinion of all the ancient Fathers, is to be understood God the FATHER, speaking by CHRIST, the LOGOS, the WORD, or Son of God: the Messenger and Representative of the Father, “the brightness of His glory, and the express image of His person;” who appeared in and spake from the Shekinah, or cloud of glory; who communed with Adam, with Noah, with Abraham and the Patriarchs; and communicated His will to and conducted the Israelitish nation. For of God the Father it is expressly said, “No man hath seen Him at any time.” “Neither heard His voice at any time, nor seen His shape.” Pyle.—This may be regarded as the germ of the whole Bible. Man has fallen, and, afraid of God, has hid himself; but God comes to look for him, and hold out the hope of mercy to him. Here is God seeking after guilty, ruined man. From Genesis to Revelation we find the same thing—God looking down on man while struggling in the billows of sin and guilt, and stretching out His hand to save him. “In other religions we see man seeking after God; in the Bible we see God seeking after man.” W. G. B.

Where art thou? Such questions do not argue ignorance in Him that asks them; but are intended to awaken the guilty to a confesssion of their crimes. As appears from chap. 4 : 9, “Where is Abel thy brother?” Of whom when Cain stubbornly refused to give an account, the Lord said immediately (to show that He needed not to be informed), “the voice of thy brother’s blood crest unto me from the ground.” Bp. Patrick.

10. I was afraid. Shame and fear were the first fruits of sin, and fruits which it has invariably produced from the first transgression to the present time. A. C.—Adam’s reply is full of evasion. He confesses not his sin, but only his fear and shame at his bodily nakedness. The question just asked had given him opportunity to own his sin and misery. His sense of bodily nakedness is indeed the sad proof of his nakedness of soul, that could not any longer bear the sight of God. And now fear has taken possession of his soul, where all was peace before. Jacobus.

11. Who told thee that thou wast naked? Adam knew not that this very consciousness betrayed him. A new faculty had come into play. He found a judge within him, of whose presence when all things smiled he had not been conscious. Conscience performed its part; it made the fallen pair miserable in the consciousness of sin. It filled them with shame and dread. It could do no more! and this was much. Kit.—Genesis gives no theory of creation, no thesis on the essence of sin, no theory of its origin; but it sets forth, in the form of a story, a sin from which each one can easily for himself develop the theory, and the thoughts involved in the narrative—thoughts which are decisive for the whole course of revelation. A definition of religion is not given; but the way in which it came about that man feels a dread of God, is exhibited in a statement of facts. With good reason has Nitzsch called Genesis the doctrinal theology of the law.

After once appearing by the free act of man, sin does not remain in this isolation. The second sin, that of self-excuse and palliation of the offence, follows immediately on the first, the sin of disobedience. This is the deceit (Ps. 32 : 2) which, when sin has once entered, prevents the realization of earnest opposition thereto. As sin thus joins to sin, it becomes a habit, and in this way a definite feature of the heart, or, as it is termed, an imagination of the heart, an inclination, which gives a perverted tendency to man’s will. O.

They ate of the tree which was to make them wise, and, alas! they saw clearly what sin was, what shame, what despair, what death. They lost God’s presence, and they gained the knowledge of evil. They lost Eden, and they gained a conscience. This is the knowledge of good and evil. Lost spirits do not know good. Angels do not know evil. Fallen beings, fallen yet not cast away, know good and evil; evil not external to them, nor yet one with them; but in them, yet not simply of them. Such was the fruit of the forbidden tree, as it remains in us to this day. Newman.

12,13. The next effect of disobedience was MUTUAL EECIMINATION between the guilty parties. Before, they were as one with themselves, as they were one with God. But now they were at variance. The charge of guilt was thrown from one to the other—by Adam upon Eve, by Eve upon the tempter—and throughout it all there was that pitiable effort which conscious guilt always engenders, to evade the light of truth, and ward off the unequivocal admission of demerit. W. A.

She gave me. Instead of confessing his sin, the man immediately throws the weight of it on the woman—nay, through the words, “whom Thou gavest me,” on God Himself; just as now sinners try to lay the fault on the temptations of others, and then on the circumstances of life which were ordained by God. Girl.—From the beginning man hath always been apt to lay the blame of his faults where it can least lie, upon goodness and perfection itself. The very first sin that ever man was guilty of he endeavored to throw upon God. And his posterity are still apt to excuse themselves the same way. Tillotson.—God gave him the woman, and she gave him the fruit; so that he seemed to have it but at one remove from God’s own hand. There is a strange proneness in those that are tempted, to say that they are tempted of God; as if our abusing God’s gifts would excuse our violation of God’s laws. God gives us riches, honors, and relations, that we may serve him cheerfully in the enjoyment of them; but if we take occasion from them to sin against him, instead of blaming Providence for putting us into such a condition, we must blame ourselves for perverting the gracious designs of Providence therein. H.

The original temptation set before our first parents was that of proving their freedom by using it without regard to the will of Him who gave it. The original excuse offered by them after sinning was that they were not really free, that they had acted under a constraining influence, the subtility of the tempter. They committed sin that they might be independent of their Maker; they defended it on the ground that they were dependent upon Him. And this has been the course of lawless pride and lust ever since; to lead us, first, to exult in our uncontrollable liberty of will and conduct; then, when we have ruined ourselves, to plead that we are the slaves of necessity. Newman.

13. The serpent beguiled me.** This first act of the devil is that wherein we may behold, “as in a glass,” the art he still used to tempt us to sin, and bring us to utter destruction. His practice is uniformly to “beguile.” He presents all things fair to our face, and suffers not evil to appear before us in its own deformed shape; for then every man would fly from it.

14. And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this.** Because he had beguiled the man and woman which God had made, and caused them to transgress his great commandment. He that is the cause and occasion of another’s sin is as hateful to God as the doer, and is liable to a greater punishment. Nay, the serpent’s doom is first read to him as if he were the arch-offender; for which same reason the woman’s sentence comes next, because she had been a sin-maker. The same might be confirmed from the quality of their several judgments; in that the serpent alone is doomed to be “cursed,” and no such sentence is pronounced either upon the man or upon the woman. Jos. Mede.—The most obvious sense of the passage assigns a measure of this curse to the literal serpent—the animal under the guise of whom Satan beguiled his victim. But the responsibility and guilt being upon the very Satan, this curse falls chiefly on him. He is degraded, doomed to eternal shame; and in his great conflict against God and goodness, to disgrace, defeat and damning ruin. H. C.—The curse pronounced upon the deceiver is plainly addressed to an intelligent agent, designedly guilty of an enormous crime, and would have been unmeaning and unworthy of the Divine character if addressed to a mere animal. That, however, the phraseology of the curse is in its outer sense applied to the condition of the serpent, while in its inner meaning terribly significant to the intelligent agent, seems clearly to show that the serpent was really employed in this awful transaction. The more closely the language of the curse is examined, the more real its purport as addressed to the intelligent agent of the temptation, under forms of speech adapted to the serpentine condition, will be apparent.

15. I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his**

heel. This could have no significance with reference to the serpent; but to the real tempter it was of awful importance. It is not likely that the fallen pair understood these words as he did. Yet even to them it must have appeared that it promised some great and crowning triumph to “the seed of the woman,” perhaps a recovery from the fall, after the enemy had seemed for a time to triumph over him, and to “bruise his heel.” But we know its meaning better than either the first pair or even Satan did then. We can see that it was the first gospel promise, foretelling the sufferings of Christ and his final triumph over the evil one—his victory in our behalf, by suffering. Kit.—“Her seed,” and “his,” give the appearance of a personal conflict and victory. This inference is strengthened by the promise being given to the seed of the woman. There has been but one descendant of Eve who had no earthly father, and he “came to destroy the works of the Devil.” Cook.—This verse has been called “the first gospel.” The gospel, to be a genuine gospel, must come in the form of a curse upon sin. Love is the fulfilling of the law; but hatred of sin is the only portal to true and pure and holy love. Thy seed and her seed are the children of Satan, and the children of God. Gibson.

I believe, that upon the fall of man death and vanity entered by the justice of God, and the image of God in man was defaced; and heaven and earth, which were made for man’s use, were subdued to corruption by his fall; but then, that instantly and without intermission of time, after the word of God’s law became through the fall of man frustrate as to obedience, there succeeded the greater word of the promise, that the righteousness of God might be wrought by faith. Bacon.

The entire gospel of redemption was in that germinal promise concerning “the seed of the woman.” Through all the ages, and in all the divers manners of its communication, it is one and the same Gospel, embodying the same great truth in its various stages of development. S. R.—The recovery of man was announced on the day of his apostasy. But the method of that recovery was a mystery, obscurely hinted at by prophets who knew not what the Spirit that was in them did testify; more and more pronounced through symbols and the later prophecies; at length, in the fulness of times, unveiled in the incarnation of Christ; but still a mystery of the divine love for the ever-unfolding glories of eternity. And all this wondrous plan is referred back to the purpose of God before the foundation of the world,—ever the same plan in the religion which the Bible reveals; ever the same purpose in Divine Providence, unfolding and fulfilling this plan; ever the same development in history, as this great purpose of redemption moves onward through the ages toward its consummation in the final accord of the physical and the moral universe, through the triumph of God over evil, of salvation over sin. Surely we who have part in such a redemption, and whose inheritance in this glory is sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise, should be holy and without blame before Him who hath blessed us with these infinite riches of his grace. J. P. T.

In the light of this first promise we see that though Satan plotted the ruin of the race, God counterplotted the ruin of Satan and the salvation of the masses of mankind. This is the birth-hour of most momentous issues. Sin came in upon Eden and upon earth; and many a bitter sorrow, many a cup of suffering and woe, must needs follow in its train; but Redemption comes in also; it enters upon its co-ordinate work to save the soul from sin and from eternal death and to bring in everlasting righteousness. The history of our world in its most vital aspects is foreshadowed here in this first short meeting of their Maker with the sinning pair. The spoken recorded words were few, but their significance was momentous; the sweep of their bearing, the issues of the divine policy here indicated, were destined to fill up the ages of time with stirring and strange conflict, and to send their influence down through the endless ages of man’s being and of God’s kingdom. H. C.—“This promise, as it is the first, is also the most indefinite.” But, even to their minds, it must have forcibly conveyed the impression that their sin and suffering would certainly be remedied; that this deliverance would be the result of a struggle in which the seed of the woman would sustain only partial injury; that their enemy or enemies would sustain final and fatal defeat; and, perhaps, that this triumph would be achieved by a being who should be, in a peculiar sense, the offspring of the woman. That this promise was of vast importance in the Divine estimation of Him who announced it may be inferred from the circumstance, that no sooner had He convicted man of his guilt than He uttered it, even before He announced the impending penalty. Not only “in the midst of wrath did He remember mercy;” but by the precedence, in the order of time, which He gave to the promise, MERCY rejoiced against judgment even in this first moment of her advent. It gave man a moral horizon, and kindled in it a star. J. H.

In this brief statement is the germ of all history. Every Messianic prophecy is traceable to it; and in it are the secrets of human sorrow and Christian joy. In its light we can more easily comprehend the universal social and moral turmoil, the struggles for salvation, the triumphs of holiness, and the certainty of victory when “the head” of the serpent is bruised, and the evil principle has become powerless, by which man was seduced to his fall. Its light is the dawn and dayspring of prophecy, showing that “Man was not excluded from Paradise till prophecy had sent him forth with some pledge and hope of consolation.” After this twofold sentence of condemnation and of promise, Prophecy appears in two distinct forms, the one prediction in words, and the other prediction in actions; it often sets forth the same truths, now verbally and now in types. W. Fraser.—In the promise to Eve we hear the first utterance of prophecy, and catch the first gleam of that light and hope which was to brighten into the perfect day. Have we not here the great elements which run through the whole Bible—“law and prophecy; the denunciation of sin and the promise of pardon; the flame which consumes and the light which comforts;” and is not this the whole of the covenant? Farrar.

The Gospel enfolded in the very curse upon the tempter, is planted among the clods of the wasted paradise to germinate and gradually unfold itself through all the subsequent revelation. The slightest analysis of the ideas contained in these words unfolds to us these great truths: That the Redeemer and Restorer of the race must be man, since he is to be of the seed of the woman; that he is to be at the same time more than man, since he is to conquer the conqueror of man, and that, too, in a world already a sinful world, which he is to regain; that the redemption shall involve a new nature, at enmity with the fallen and enslaved nature; that this redemption is to be accomplished by vicarious suffering, since suffering is involved in the bruising of his heel; that the new nature shall be a regeneration by the power of Jehovah, for it is not a natural enmity, but “I will put the enmity” between the redeemed man and the children of the devil; that the redemption shall involve the gathering out of the race a “peculiar people” at enmity with the natural children of the devil; and that the redemption shall involve the ultimate triumph of the woman’s seed in at last bruising the head of and destroying the tempter. Such is the sentence pronounced, and the promise involved in it, anterior to the passing of the sentence upon man himself. With such a promise of mercy revealed to faith, the sinner might listen without hopeless despair to the curse—Eve to the curse of subjection and multiplied sorrow—Adam to the curse of sorrow in the eating of bread, and the curse of the ground for his sake, and the doom, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and “dust thou art, and to dust shalt thou return.” S. R.

He that shall bruise the head of the serpent shall belong, says the Book of Genesis, to the race of Shem, to the posterity of Abraham and Jacob, to the kingdom of Judah. (Gen. 9:26; 12:3; 49:10.) Guizot.—Though this promise was not fulfilled till four thousand years after, yet the benefits commenced from this very time; which was before God had rejected Cain and preferred Seth to him; and long before any restriction was made to Noah’s family, or Shem’s, who derived from him; that all the world might look upon the Messiah, as a common benefit to all the sons of Adam. Patrick.—The Incarnation begins to appear, in its preparations and foretokenings, at the very beginning of the Biblical period, as the one central fact and supreme glory of the whole. The Redemption is the theme of the sublime chorus of inspired voices from Genesis to the Apocalypse. As on the Mount of Transfiguration, so in the high seats of Prophecy, Psalm, Sacred History, and typical anticipation, the elders speak of the decease which should be accomplished at Jerusalem. F. D. H.

Jewish prophecy reveals from its very first word its bearing upon mankind as a whole: “the seed of the woman,” in the original signifies the whole of humanity. At the call of Abraham the prophetic horizon seems to narrow itself. But it is then that it takes pains to affirm and expressly to declare its universal tendency. “In thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” The seed of Abraham, that is, the people of Israel, is only the means to an end; the end itself was “all the families of the earth.” And when, at last, prophecy concentrates itself upon that wonderful Person in whom all preceding promises were to find their fulfilment, this is the language in which He is spoken of: “I have given thee the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” Godet.

The whole human race shall not be the prey of the devil. To the seed of the serpent the Lord opposes the seed of the woman, the great representative of fallen and delivered humanity, the second Adam, the Redeemer of the world Himself. Promised in Eden, announced to the patriarchs, predicted by the prophets, He is born of a virgin, He comes to repair the ravages of sin by making an expiation for it, and to destroy the kingdom of darkness by triumphing over it on the cross. Under this glorious Captain, anticipated or received by faith, is gathered, in all generations, a people, the children of the Most High, “who are born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Delivered from the condemnation of sin, and from the influence of him who for too long a time had deceived them, reinstated, according to their original destination, in the favor of God, “a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people, they show forth the praises of Him who hath called them out of darkness into His marvellous light.” W. Hare.—Thus we perceive that the Church began with the very first sinners of our race, and that the gospel began to be revealed also at the beginning of our race. The Bible, therefore, is the record of only one religion; the development of one and the same way of salvation; and is the history of one and the same Church from first to last. S. R.

From the time of the Fall, we have two different typical forms, the one after the seed of the serpent, the other after the seed of the woman. Henceforth there is a contest between the serpent and Him who is to destroy the power of the serpent, between the flesh and the Spirit, between the world and the Church. Two manner of people are now seen struggling in the womb of time—a Cain and an Abel, an Ishmael and an Isaac, an Esau and a Jacob, an Absalom and a Solomon, the elder born after the flesh, and the younger born after the Spirit. It is this unity of figure fully as much as the “type” of sound doctrine which gives a consistency, in the minds of believers, to our religion in all ages; which enables the Christian to profit, to this day, by the teaching of the Old Testament; to sing, to this day, the song of Moses and the Psalms of David; and to perceive and feel that there are the same contests now as then, the same contests in the heart, the same contests in the world, between the evil and the good principle, between the first, or nature-born, and the second, or grace-born. In short, there are now, as there have ever been, but two men on our earth typical or representative; the first man, which is Adam, the second, which is Christ. McCosh.

Even the Jewish Rabbins could discern some common ground between the heritage of evil derived from Adam, and the good to be effected by Messiah. “The secret of Adam,” says one of them, “is the secret of Messiah;” and another, “As the first man was the one that sinned, so shall the Messiah be the one to do the sin away.” They recognized in Adam and Christ the two heads of humanity, with whom all mankind must be associated for evil or for good. On surer grounds we know that Adam was in this respect “the type of Him that was to come.” But in this respect alone; for in all other points we have to think of differences. The only principle that belongs to them in common stands in the relation they hold, the one to a fallen, the other to a restored, offspring. The natural seed of Adam are dealt with as one with himself in transgression and in death, the wages of transgression. And the spiritual seed of Christ are dealt with as one with Him in the consummate righteousness He brought in and in the eternal life. “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”—all who stand connected with Christ in the economy of grace, as they do with Adam in the economy of nature. How could this be, but by the sin of Adam being regarded as the sin of humanity, and the righteousness of Christ as the property of those who by faith rest upon His name? Hence, in Romans 5, along with the facts which in the two cases attest the doctrine of headship, we find the parallel extended so as to include also the respective grounds out of which they spring: “As by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life. For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” And it is not in the power of human reason to give either a satisfactory view of the apostle’s meaning, or a rational account of the facts themselves, on any other ground than this principle of headship. He must know nothing aright of sin or salvation who is incapable of finding comfort in this view of the subject. And yet there is a ground of comfort higher still, in that it secures for believers a condition better than that possessed by man before the fall. For the second Adam has received for Himself and His redeemed an inheritance corresponding to His personal worth and dignity. As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. What an elevating prospect! destined to be conformed to the image of the Son of God, and in consequence to share with Him in the life, the blessedness, and the glory which He inherits in the kingdom of the Father! Coupling, then, the end of the divine plan with the beginning, we find that the principle of headship is really fraught with the richest beneficence; for through this an avenue has been laid open for us into the realms above, and our natures have become linked in fellowship of good with what is best and highest in the universe. P. F.

The virtue, then, which comes from our union with Jesus is higher than the sin which comes from our union with Adam is deep. The bliss which attends our connection with the antitype is nobler than the pain which attends our connection with the type is debasing. The relations of the universe to the seed of the woman are more numerous, more honorable, than the relations of the universe to the instigator of our transgression are complicated and sad. Park.

The serpent was to have “a seed,"—that is, a party animated by his spirit; while the great Deliverer was to have one animated by his. These two parties would be in perpetual conflict with each other, but at last the party of the serpent would be overthrown. In Cain and Abel, the first born of Adam’s sons, appeared the first representatives of these antagonist seeds. The whole history of the church and of the world shows them in perpetual conflict; and so bitter and inveterate is the spirit of the worldly, or serpent’s party, toward the godly, that the conflict will never cease until the former are wholly destroyed. W. G. B.—This enmity underlies the mighty conflict of the ages—Christ and Satan each leading on his host to battle, and no peace or even truce arresting hostilities till the victory of the King of Kings shall be complete and ineffably glorious. Thus the first relation between serpent and woman—that of assumed but treacherous friendship—develops into everlasting enmity—God, her real friend, becoming in the person of his incarnate Son, born of woman—her champion and the mighty antagonist of Satan and all his offspring. Here and thus mercy breaks in upon this scene of sin and ruin, and God begins the wonderful process of making the wrath of Satan the occasion of his own infinite glory. H. C.—Christ baffled Satan’s temptations, rescued souls out of his hands, cast him out of the bodies of people, dispossessed the strong man armed, and divided the spoil: by his death, he gave a fatal and incurable blow to the Devil’s kingdom, a wound to the head of this beast, that can never be healed. As his gospel gets ground, Satan falls (Luke 10:18), and is bound (Rev. 20:2). By his grace he treads Satan under his people’s feet (Rom. 16:20), and will shortly cast him into the lake of fire (Rev. 20 : 10). . . . As the fruit of this enmity there is a continual conflict between grace and corruption in the hearts of God’s people : Satan, by their corruptions, assaults them, buffets them, sifts them, and seeks to devour them ; they, by the exercise of their graces, resist him, wrestle with him, quench his fiery darts, force him to flee from them. H.

As the way of redemption could not be contrived but by an infinite wisdom, so it could not be accomplished but by an infinite power. None but God could shape such a design, and none but God could effect it. The Divine power in temporal deliverances, and freedom from the slavery of human oppressors, veils to that which glitters in redemption ; whereby the devil is defeated in his designs, stripped of his spoils, and yoked in his strength. The power of God in creation requires not those degrees of admiration as in redemption. In creation the world was erected from nothing ; as there was nothing to act, so there was nothing to oppose ; no victorious devil was in that to be subdued, no thundering law to be silenced, no death to be conquered, no transgression to be pardoned and rooted out, no hell to be shut, no ignominious death upon the cross to be suffered. It had been, in the nature of the thing, an easier thing to Divine power to have created a new world, than repaired a broken and purified a polluted one. This is the most admirable work that ever God brought forth in the world, greater than all the marks of his power in the first creation. Charnock.—When I think on the difference between God’s creating a world and God’s pardoning a sin—the one done without effort, the other demanding an instrumentality terribly sublime ; the one effected by a word, the other wrought out in agony and blood on a quaking earth and beneath a darkened heaven—oh, the world created is as nothing by the side of the sin blotted out ; that God can pardon is at the very summit of what is wonderful ; and therefore then, O Lord, do I most know Thee as the omnipotent when I behold in Thee the long-suffering. H. Melville.

16. In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. In maternity a woman completes her nature. Every sorrow of body or soul is made into a new thread in the web of affection which she weaves around the life of the child for whom she suffers. She has another blessing in a certain case in losing self. Men find it less natural to be unselfish. The mother almost spontaneously drops off the robe of self. Her sorrow of maternity brings a blessing to the world. What silent, forceful lessons of the blessed life has motherhood given to the world ! As her sorrow has been multiplied, so has her power to bestow the blessings of civilized and gentle life been multiplied. This sorrow has been an education to the world. The great thought of Christianity is that only through sacrifice of self can life be given to others, or life be realized by the giver. Motherhood permits woman to live her life in another life. It is the likest thing to God’s life. When the curse of Genesis is felt the most, then there is the deepest sense of blessing. In the new life given to the world the mother finds her most perfect rapture. Here is an ever-repeated fact that educates the world to understand that life comes out of sacrifice. Brooke.

17-19. Moral and physical evil were not originally in the world. The latter was penally ordained after the former had entered the world by the free act of man, and from this time forward both form an element of the divine order of the world. O.—Cursed the ground for thy sake. Before, he was put into the garden to till it and keep it ; but now the soil is to be stubborn and to defy his labor, and cause him pain and disappointment. Before, he had access to the tree of life, which was to make him immortal ; now he is to be driven out from access to it, and to return to the earth again. Alf.—Even here there is some mark of mercy : for, whereas the serpent is cursed directly, and that with a reference to the earth he was to travel over ; here on the contrary the earth, rather than the man, is cursed, though for the man’s sake and with reference to him. E. H. B.

18. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. Whenever man cultivates nature and then abandons her to her own unaided energies, the result is far worse than if he had never attempted to improve her at all. There are no such thorns found in a state of nature as those produced by the ground which man once has tilled, but has now deserted. In the waste clearings amidst the fern brakes of New Zealand, and in the primeval forests of Canada, thorns may now be seen which were unknown before. The nettle and the thistle follow man wherever he goes, and remain as perpetual witnesses of his presence, even though he departs. Macmillan.

19. The artificial state of most societies does, indeed, keep the lower classes much more depressed than a better state of the world would bring them into ; but at the best, nature unites with revelation in attesting the truth of the sentence passed upon man—In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread. And this necessity for severe labor is not confined to the cultivation of the earth, but extends to all kinds of human pursuits. E. Hitchcock.—This eating our bread in the sweat of our face, is a curse; it is a promise; it is a precept. It is a curse, in that God will not suffer the earth to afford us bread without our sweat. It is a promise, in that God assureth us we shall have bread for our sweat. And it is a precept too, in that God enjoineth us, if we will have bread, to sweat for it. Bp. Sanderson.—It is still true that with the vast majority this life is a continual fight against want, and a struggle for the miserable pittance that will supply the barest demands of existence. From the equator with its burning suns to the poles with their frozen seas, the cry of earth’s millions goes up for bread, and the life-struggle goes on with a sin-cursed earth, which yields up only to the force of toil the means of existence.

But in another view the Creator was but providing for the highest interests of the fallen creature in making labor his inevitable lot. If it is true that nothing worth attaining of earthly good can be attained and preserved without labor, it is equally true that the labor itself is to man the means of highest blessing, and idleness his direst curse. Nay, under this sentence, he only can rightly serve God who fulfils cheerfully the conditions which God has laid upon him. Hence, the significance of the song of the old monks: “Labor are est orare”—“To work is to worship.” Under the present economy nothing worth living for can be attained save under this law. All the world’s spoken epics, all the world’s acted heroism, all the world’s suffered martyrdoms, have their root in that great law—Sweat of the brow, sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart! S. R.

The law of Labor is the primal law of the human economy. Our first father was set to work in those days when work and worship were one. And after sin brought its curse upon the earth, the law was written again by the finger of God in the sweat of man’s brow. But it was no Cain-mark there. It was not the curse of Cain, that he should toil and sweat; but rather that he should be an idler and a vagabond, stung out of the hive of earth’s first workers. The Devil is no friend to labor, for he spirited away Job’s oxen and flocks, and sent him to a pile of ashes to scrape his boils at leisure. Labor is one of the best defences against the assaults of the Tempter. He can hardly make a workshop out of an honest, hearty laborer; but a lounger need hold out no sign-board. Labor is the glory of man. It makes him a producer—I had almost said a creator; thus giving a proof that he is the image of God. It is the spice of man’s food; the balm of sleep; a good companion for the conscience; the handmaid of piety. It is widely and closely related to all human interests. . . . And what a magnificent workshop God has fitted up for man in the world which he inhabits. The forces of nature wait to be wooed and won. The vegetable kingdom unlocks her stores to the key of Labor. The animal kingdom bows its neck to the yoke man puts upon it. The world is stocked with fuel, with forces, with mechanical powers, with a thousand conveniences for intelligent, contriving mechanical workers. A sovereign voice in nature invites and summons man to Labor. T. H. Robinson.

In a life of gayety, or a merely thoughtful existence, in that state of leisure to which so many minds are exposed, woe and trial to the spirit that has nothing for the hands to do! Misery to him or her who emancipates himself or herself from the universal law, “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.” Evil thoughts, despondency, sensual feeling, sin in every shape is before him, to beset and madden, often to ruin him. F. W. Robertson.—If the love of God be the ruling motive in our daily life, if his will be our law, his honor our end, there will rest even upon the dullest and most trivial work we perform, a light from heaven to ennoble and to glorify it; for God, who rules in us, will by our actions make himself known to men. You have not imposed upon yourselves the work of your life; it is God who has imposed it upon you. Every task God has given you to perform, must be a matter of moment to you, for every such task is a token of grace: it is something that the King of heaven and of earth has chosen us to do for him. When a man comes to do his daily task in the spirit of a faith like this, the curse which rests upon our labor is taken away, and transmuted into a blessing. A. T.—The same devotion to God’s will that is the solace of distress is the inspiration of labor. We have not ascended to the loftiest and worthiest motive of all well-doing till we have reached this mark. You and I, in this little day of life and with these poor powers, can verily do something to further the purposes and glory of the ineffable Name. Could that thought penetrate our common avocations, business, hospitality, trades, studies, to what a height of sacred dignity would it lift them, and of what dross and meanness, and selfish grossness, and besotted care, would it purge them clean! F. D. H.

Unto dust shalt thou return. The end and consummation of all his earthly misery—bodily death, “returning to dust”—is announced to man as the second article of his sentence. It means temporal death with all preceding pains and infirmities, to be succeeded by the second death in the case of those not delivered from its power. In this, too, punishment and deliverance are conjoined—punishment for the sinner, deliverance from all earthly troubles for the believer; God’s justice in league with his compassion. C. G. B.—The sentence, as far as temporal death is concerned, has from the beginning, with two exceptions only, been faithfully and punctually executed. Every successive instance of mortality is a fresh manifestation of God’s truth. For six thousand years, one generation has been going and another coming. So continual and unvarying has been the succession of generation to generation, that death has come to be regarded and spoken of as the course of nature; and we are in danger of forgetting that it is the execution of a sentence, that it is a penal infliction. And this punctual faithfulness in the execution of a part of God’s sentence against sin, is used, and rightly used, for impressing the conviction that the execution of the whole is as sure as that of the part. Wardlaw.—Diseases have shattered the excellent frame of man’s body; and by a new dispensation immortality is swallowed up of mortality. The same disaster and decay has invaded his spirituals. The passions rebel, every faculty would usurp and rule; and there are so many governors that there can be no government. The light within us is become darkness; and the understanding, that should be eyes to the blind faculty of the will, is blind itself, and so brings all the inconveniences that attend a blind follower under the conduct of a blind guide. He that would have a clear demonstration of this, let him reflect upon that numerous litter of strange, senseless, absurd opinions that crawl about the world to the disgrace of reason and the unanswerable reproach of a broken intellect. South.

In Adam the race came under “the law of sin and death.” To convince man of his sinfulness, to awaken in him the desire for redemption, and to make known to him the nature and mode of this redemption, must be henceforth the primary object of the Divine teaching. God will not only be known as the Supreme Ruler, but also as the Holy One who abhors sin, as the Righteous Judge who punishes unrighteousness, and as the Merciful Father who forgives the repentant. These aspects of God’s charater we may, therefore, expect to see made prominent in his subsequent dealings with sinful and disobedient men. S. J. Andrews.

This is the account of the entrance of sin, to which the Bible is pledged. It came into the world by the will of man contravening the known will of God—not by the gradual decline of a race of men from primitive simplicity and purity, but “by one man’s disobedience,” the fall from his integrity of the head and parent of our race. Thereafter, sin, having obtained an entrance into the world, continued and spread by a law of descent and a power of contagion. And judgment followed; death by sin;—and “death has passed on all, for all have sinned.” D. F.

The administration of mediatorial rule existed from the time of the entrance of sin into our world. The Son of God then entered on the administration of all his mediatorial functions. The voice of the Lord God, walking in the garden in the cool of the day, announced him as a prophet: the institution of sacrifices, which was coeval with the fall of man, exhibited him as a priest: and the warfare betwixt the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, which then commenced, unfolded his regal character. In this latter capacity, he never ceased afterwards to act. The formation of the church in Eden; the translation of Abel’s righteous soul to glory; the reorganization of the church with Noah; the covenant made with Abraham, and renewed with Isaac and Jacob; the establishment of the Jewish economy under Moses; the many interpositions made on behalf of the armies of Israel, by which they were rendered victorious over their enemies; the appointment of Judges; and the raising up of kings in the line of David, to dispense the benefits of civil government to God’s ancient people—are all so many regal acts of Prince Messiah. Symington.

In the first three and the last three chapters of the Bible we find the initiatory and concluding links in the great chain of evolutions, according to which the decree of God’s mercy is progressively unfolded until the completion of his kingdom. In the one we have the first heaven and earth ruined by the fall of man; in the other, a new heaven and a new earth, the tabernacle of God with men. In the one the victory of the serpent amid the exultation of hell; in the other, his overthrow and deserved reward. Here a paradise lost; there a paradise restored. Here the first Adam, with his help-mate, tempted and fallen; there the second Adam, with his holy and blessed bride, the

Church. Here death and misery; there resurrection and life, and deliverance from all evil. Here the commencement of man’s chronology; there its termination. C. G. B.

The story of the Fall, like that of the Creation, has wandered over the world. Heathen nations have transplanted and mixed it up with their geography, their history, their mythology, although it has never so completely changed form, and color, and spirit, that you cannot recognize it. In the Law, it preserves the character of a universal, human, world-wide fact: and the groans of Creation, the Redemption that is in

Christ Jesus, and the heart of every man, conspire in their testimony to the most literal truth of the narrative. It may be that in this history of man’s fall, and of God’s preparation for the redemption of men through judgment and struggles, facts and dress are to be distinguished; but with the substantial reality of this history the religion of redemption stands and falls. Also, the historical verity of the origin of mankind is one of the indispensable presuppositions of Christianity, which, without it, can be the religion of the most perfect morals, but not the religion of the redemption of mankind. Delit.

20. And the man called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living. And 21 the LORD God made for Adam and for his wife coats of skins, and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for 23 ever: therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from 24 whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim, and the flame of a sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

20. “And Adam called his wife’s name Life, because she was the mother of all the living.” This is a proper and faithful representation of the Hebrew text. A. C.—If the first of a race fall before he has any offspring, the race is fallen. The guilt, the depravity, the penalty, all belong to the race. This is a great mystery. But it seems to follow inevitably from the constitution of a race, and it has clear evidences of its truth both in the facts and the doctrines of the Bible. When we come to view the sin of our first parents in this light, it is seen to entail tremendous consequences to every individual of the race. The single transgression has involved the guilt, the depravity, and the death, not only of Adam, but of that whole race which was in him, and thus has changed the whole character and condition of mankind throughout all time. M.

21. Coats of skins. This presupposes the killing of animals, and permission given by God to do so, which laid the foundation of bloody sacrifices. What had been done by themselves under the first impulse of shame after the fall, this God now does for them after a more perfect manner. He sanctions the feeling of shame, and the sense of decency and propriety which arises therefrom. Gerl.—It is probable that they were the skins of beasts slain in sacrifice, which was then first instituted in ratification of the gracious covenant, just made by God with our first parents; and which was intended the better to represent to them their guilt, and that the promised seed should vanquish the devil, and redeem them by shedding his blood. Patrick.—The commission of sin, and the promise of a Redeemer, being the grand objects to which sacrifice refers, no period seems more fit for its appointment than that at which sin first entered and the promise was first delivered: that is, the period immediately succeeding the fall. If sacrifice be admitted to have been coeval with the fall, every argument which has been adduced to prove that Abel offered sacrifices in obedience to the divine injunction, will apply with increased force to show that Adam must have done the same. The whole of the animal (if the offering be supposed an

holocaust, as there is good reason to conclude all to have been until the Mosaic institution), would here be devoted to the uses of religion except the skin, which would be employed for the purpose of clothing. Magee.

As soon as the promise of mercy had been disclosed to the offenders, and the constitution of mingled goodness and severity brought in, God made coats to clothe them with, and these coats of skins. But clothing so obtained argued the sacrifice of life in the animal that furnished them; and thus, through the death of an inferior yet innocent living creature, was the needed relief brought to their disquieted consciences. The outward and corporeal here manifestly had respect to the inward and spiritual. The covering of their nakedness was a gracious token from the hand of God, that the sin which had alienated them from Him, and made them conscious of uneasiness, was henceforth to be in His sight as if it were not; so that in covering their flesh, He at the same time covered their consciences. So God’s fundamental act in removing and covering out of sight the shame of conscious guilt in the first offenders, would naturally and rightfully be viewed as a revelation of God, teaching them how in henceforth dealing with Him they were to proceed in effecting the removal of guilt, and appearing, notwithstanding it, in the presence of God. They found, in this divine act, the key to a justified condition, and an acceptable intercourse with Heaven. Had they not done so, it would have been incapable of rational explanation, how a believing Abel should so soon have appeared in possession of it. We thus hold sacrifice—sacrifice in the higher sense, not as expressive of dependence and thankfulness merely, but as connected with sin and forgiveness, expiatory sacrifice—to have been, as to its foundation, of divine origin. It had its rise in an act of God, done for the express purpose of relieving guilty consciences of their sense of shame and confusion; and from the earliest periods of recorded worship it stands forth to our view as the religious solemnity in which faith had its most peculiar exercise, and for which God bestowed the tokens of his acceptance and blessing. P. F.

The clothing of our first parents by the hand of God had respect to more than the investiture of the body; it was symbolical of spiritual things and a provision for that guilt felt as nakedness or exposure to Divine wrath. Were it merely to supply a physical want, there was no reason why a suitable vegetable production should not be selected in preference to the skins of animals which necessitated the taking away of life at a time when animal food was not allowed as an article of human diet. No probable account can be given of the way in which the bodies of the animals were disposed of, if not offered in sacrifice and consumed upon the altar. From its very nature and design as unfolded in scripture, sacrifice must have been contemporaneous, or nearly so with the first announcement of redemption. D. M.

There can be no reasonable doubt that the sacrifice of living animals was now instituted as a prophetic figure of the great sacrifice which should fulfil this promise. The whole reason for sacrifice began to exist now: its use is taken for granted in the next chapter; and it continues throughout the patriarchal age without the record of any other beginning. Thus early, then, man learned that, “without shedding of blood, there is no remission of sin;” that his own forfeited life was redeemed, and to be restored by the sacrifice of the coming “seed of the woman;” and that he was placed by God under a new dispensation of mercy. Nay, even his punishment was a mercy; for his suffering was a discipline to train him in submission to God’s will. The repentance of our first parents is nowhere expressly stated: but it is implied here and in the subsequent narrative. P. S.—The Church of God hath always believed that Adam repented and laid hold on the mercy of a second covenant, and was received again into divine favor; although there be no express mention of this in his history. We do not read of any precept or law given by God to Adam after his fall, but we find the practice of sacrificing in his family. And it will be very difficult to him that considers the matter thoroughly, to imagine that he invented that rite of his own head; he was taught it therefore by the command and institution of God. And it is highly reasonable to think that at the same time when God gave a second law and institution, he encouraged him also to the obedience of it by a promise of acceptance and restitution to his former favor. Upon this hope doubtless he renewed his allegiance to his Creator, and devoted himself to the worship and service of God, and taught his sons, Cain and Abel, to do so likewise. From him they learned to present their several offerings to the Lord (Gen. 4), where we read also (ver. 4, 5) that God had respect to Abel’s offering, and declared his acceptance of it by some visible sign taken notice of by his brother Cain; probably, as the Hebrew doctors tell us, “by a fire from heaven, inflaming his offering.” Bull.

It is not affirmed in this book that God ordained the offering of sacrifice to himself, but it is made evident that acceptable worshippers, such as Abel, Noah, and Abraham, followed some intimation of the Divine will, and made their oblations—not according to mere human impulses or instincts, but in faith and in the obedience of faith. Abel’s sacrifice is affirmed in the New Testament to have been offered “in faith.” With sacrifice Noah took possession of a New World; with sacrifice at Shechem, Abraham entered on the Land of Promise. The heathen soon debased the ordinance of sacrifice to cruel and superstitious rites, but from the beginning its idea was the solemn devotement of life to God, pouring out the soul unto death, in type of the slain “Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world.” D. F.

Man’s first sin was an effort at independence; his first acceptable act of worship, as a sinner, must be a profound acknowledgment that he is more dependent than ever. His first sin was an action; his first expression of sorrow must be an act of self-condemnation. And such is sacrifice—self-immolation “in a figure.” His sin was a virtual diversion of all the kingdoms of nature which had been given into his hand that he as their interpreter and minister might give the glory of the whole to God; in his first sacrifice, he is to bring them all back again—for in the altar, the wood, and the victim, they were all present—and is thus to take them as the witnesses of his guilt in abusing them, and of his penitence and dependence in restoring them again to the Great Proprietor. And thus the first promise and the first institute, like the first prohibition, were designed to impress man with a sense of his entire dependence, and to augment his motives of obedience; so that they belong, in this respect, to the one great system of means—proclaiming the same truths, and promoting the same end. And this principle we may expect to find pervading the whole economy of the Divine manifestation; exhibiting the blessed God as taking occasion from man’s guilty and helpless condition to unfold a new aspect of his own all sufficiency. J. H.

Man is not the only being who has fallen, and yet man is the only being who is redeemed. When we inquire as to the reason of this arrangement we find none. It is one of the deep things which belong to God. It is an impressive display of sovereignty, where all that is left for us is to bow and to adore. We might have supposed that the higher race would have been selected, and that God would have glorified his mercy on the still more conspicuous theatre from which they had sought to cast themselves down. And altogether independently of the example of their rejection, we might have anticipated that man’s ruin would have been final and hopeless. Man does not forgive where he has been insulted as God was in man’s rebellion. Nations do not tolerate blows aimed at their independence and their very existence, and therefore man’s revolt might have been expected to draw down swift and remediless destruction, for it was a blow aimed at God’s throne and being. That God’s thoughts should in such a crisis have been thoughts of peace is the wonder of unfallen beings and of those who are redeemed. They cannot rise in thought to that awful council wherein, though every foreseen trespass demanded vengeance, mercy yet rejoiced against judgment, without exclaiming, “This is not the manner of man, O Lord God.” Gairns.

Mercy alone could make the dispensation possible. Mercy both introduced it, and was introduced by it. Then first mercy became known to man; perhaps to the universe. From the moment man sinned and incurred condemnation, it is difficult to conceive on what ground the human race could have been perpetuated, apart from a remedial scheme. For justice to have taken its direct course would have involved the destruction of the transgressors. The dispensation of mercy literally caught man in the very act of falling, arrested his descent to perdition, and placed him on an entirely new footing. Hence, the entire constitution of things by which humanity subsists is represented in Scripture as resting on a basis of mediation. And although this great fact may have only dimly dawned on the antediluvian believer, he must have been often amazed at that outburst of grace which was ever flowing onward in a dispensation of good, encircling him and all his race. For the same reason that mercy was free for any, it was free for all. The promise was “the Gospel preached before” to the antediluvian world. The Protevangelium was “to every creature.” The altar was unfenced. The various interpositions of Heaven to re-enforce its means of winning attention were so many devices of mercy. The “preachers of righteousness” were its agents. The period of respite, during the building of the ark, was one long wail of mercy. J. H.

22. Lest he take of the tree of life, and live forever. The design of the tree of knowledge was entirely moral: it was set there as the test and instrument of probation; and its disuse, if we may so speak, was its only allowable use. The tree of life, however, had its natural use, like the other trees of the garden; and both from its name and its position in the centre of the garden we may infer that the effect of its fruit upon the human frame was designed to be altogether peculiar. The words seem plainly to indicate that the tree of life was originally intended for the food of man; that the fruit it yielded was the divinely appointed medium of maintaining in him the power of an endless life; and that now, since he had sinned against God, and had lost all right to the possession of such a power, he was debarred from access to the natural means of sustaining it, by being himself rigorously excluded from the garden of Eden. . . . “To him that overcometh,” says Jesus, after having entered on His glory, “will I give to eat of the tree of life, that is in the midst of the paradise of God.” And again, “Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.” The least we can gather from such declarations is, that everything which was lost in Adam shall be again recovered in Christ for the heirs of His salvation. The tempter has prevailed long, but, God be thanked, he is not to prevail forever. There is yet to come forth from the world new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness shall dwell—another paradise with its tree of life—and a ransomed people created anew after the image of God, and fitted for the high destiny of manifesting His glory before the universe. There will be a sphere and condition of being immensely higher and better than what was originally set up by the hand of God. As the occupants here shall be the second Adam and His seed—the Lord from heaven, in whom humanity has been raised to peerless majesty and splendor—there must also be a corresponding rise in the nature of the things to be occupied. A higher sphere of action and enjoyment shall be brought in, because there is a higher style of being to possess it. There shall not be the laying anew of earth’s old foundations, but rather the raising of these aloft to a nobler elevation—not nature revived merely, but nature glorified—humanity, no longer as it was in the earthy and natural man, but as it is and ever shall be in the spiritual and heavenly, and that placed in a theatre of life and blessing every way suitable to its exalted condition. The internal and the external, the personal and the relative, shall be in harmonious and fitting adjustment to each other. All hunger shall be satisfied, and all thirst forever quenched. The inhabitant shall never say, “I am sick.” And like the river itself, which flows in perennial fulness from the throne of God, the well-spring of life in the redeemed shall never know interruption or decay. Blessed, then, it may be truly said, are those who do the commandments of God, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. P. F.

23. Sent him forth from the garden.** That mankind should have been expelled from the region of life, and made subject to a curse which doomed them to sorrow and trouble, disease and death, in consequence of their violation of a single command of Heaven, was a proof patent to all, and memorable in the annals of the world, that everything in the divine government is subordinate to the principles of rectitude. “There was in it,” as was strikingly said by Irving, “a most sublime act of holiness. God, after making Adam a creature for an image and likeness of Himself, did resolve him into vile dust through viler corruption, when once he had sinned; proving that one act of sin was, in God’s sight, of far more account than a whole world teeming with beautiful and blessed life, which He would rather send headlong into death than suffer one sin of His creature to go unpunished. And though creation’s teeming fountain might flow on ever so long, still the flowing waters of created life must ever empty themselves into the gulf of death. This is a most sublime exaltation of the moral above the material.” P. F.

Eden was lost: nor could man regain and re-enter it. This is the substance of the whole narrative. The first probation of human nature ended in shame, suffering, recrimination, remorse, and death. The world has had one Eden—and only one. Man has never discovered and reclaimed it since our progenitors lost it. Fable has told us of the garden of the Hesperides, of Elysian fields, but who has ever found an Eden? We have read of royal magnificence, of sumptuous palaces, of gardens wrought by art, watered by fountains, and replenished by affluence, but we have never read of human abodes in which there existed the innocence, the love, the fearlessness, the joy, of original paradise. We have never read of the royal residence into which death might not intrude; nor the bosom into which sorrow never could enter. W. A.

The world in the midst of which we live is not now what it was as it came from the hands of its Creator. Harsh discords and disharmonies have found their way into it, and make themselves everywhere to be heard. What means, for instance, the volcano, with its clouds of ashes and streams of liquid fire, carrying death and destruction to the peaceful towns and villages that reposed in fancied security at its base? What mean those fierce throes and shakings of the earth, which cause whole cities to topple down on their dwellers, and to crush them beneath their ruins? What the wild tornadoes, which strew the coasts with the wrecks of ships and the corpses of men? What, again, the pestilential marsh, the very breath of which is fatal to all human life? The state of Paradise has disappeared not for man only, but for the whole creation. Man did not fall alone; God had set him as the lord and king of the earth, in whom all its glories should centre, in whom they all should be summed up. Only a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor, he was to have dominion over the works of God’s hands; all things were put under his feet. But when he rebelled against God, this lower nature rebelled against him. The confusion which sin had introduced into his relations to God found its echo and avenging counterpart in the confusions of nature’s relations to him; all became out of joint; he dragged all after him in a common ruin. Glimpses, indeed, of the beauty of Paradise still survive; fragments of that broken sceptre, which man once wielded over the inferior creation, still remain in his hands. But much, very much, has disappeared. Trench.

Man was still the subject of moral government. No power was lost from the soul. His emotions retained their susceptibility, though diverted from their highest object. His power of moral discrimination was not destroyed, though overruled. His will remained as active and energetic as before. His chosen motives came now, indeed, from an inferior domain; the right disposition of his powers was gone, each being placed in a new and a false relation to the others, but all remained. Man’s second sin was as free as his first. J. H.—After his fall man retained freedom of choice. As by his voluntary act he had become sinful, so also must he by free choice accept salvation. Neither the one nor the other could be forced upon him from without. K.—If no power had been lost from the human constitution, neither had any law of moral government been repealed, nor any perfection of the Divine character obscured. The theology of unfallen man, as implied especially in the primal law, was—a powerful, wise, and beneficent Creator; that Creator his equitable moral Governor; and immortal happiness in prospect as the reward of his obedience; and a threatened death or loss as the deserved penalty of disobedience. And this was no less the theory of fallen man. The new revelation of Mercy involved no withdrawing of the claims of Justice. The sin of man was no frustration of moral government; for that government showed itself capable of enforcing its sanctions. With man’s first moment of conscious guilt commenced a process of self-punishment, for that very consciousness involved suffering. The external sentence only interpreted his fears, and ratified his self-pronounced condemnation. Nor was he less a subject of moral government after Mercy had arrested him in his guilty descent than he was before. That mercy involved no relaxation of law, no apology for the government under which man had fallen. So far from arraigning the equity of that rule, mercy supported it, forgiveness proclaimed it. Sacrifice and expiation were the methods of indemnifying and celebrating it. Mercy left man in the hand of justice still, and only rescued him from its punishment; and just so much of mercy as there was in the rescue was there of justice in the punishment. Hence, the original government was still in force. J. H.

All was not absolutely lost. The knowledge which our first parents had of the work of creation, and of the character of God as therein displayed, could not altogether vanish from their minds; it had formed the groundwork of that adoration of God and fellowship with him which constituted the religion of Paradise; and even after Paradise was lost, they must still have derived from it, and preserved in the depths of their spiritual being, some of the more fundamental elements of truth and duty. That all things were made by God; that as they came from his hand they were, one and all, very good; that the work of creation in six days was succeeded by a day of peculiar sacredness and rest; that man himself was made in the image of God, and as such had all here below placed in a relation of subservience to him, while, because he bore God’s image, he was bound to use all in obedience to the will of God, and for the glory of His name;—these, and various other collateral points of knowledge, which must have been familiar to man before the fall,—since otherwise he should have been ignorant alike of his proper place and calling in creation,—could not fail to abide also with him after it. And since it pleased God not to destroy His fallen creature, but to perpetuate his existence on earth, and amid mingled experiences of good and evil to animate him with the prospect of ultimate recovery, it was to be understood that all creation privileges and gifts stood as at first conferred, except in so far as they might be expressly recalled or through the altered constitution of things placed in another relation to man than they originally held. Paradise itself, with its ample heritage of life and blessing, had ceased to be to him what it had been. But the mutual relation of the fallen pair themselves; their common relation to the world around them, with its living creatures and manifold productions; their higher relation to God, as still bearing, though now sadly marred, His divine image and called to reflect it by a becoming imitation of His example;—these all remained in principle, only modified in action by the workings of sin on man’s part, and on God’s by the introduction of an economy of grace.

That everything was not subjected to instantaneous and overwhelming destruction, was itself a proof of the introduction of a principle of grace into the divine administration. The mere respite of the sentence of death (which, if justice alone had prevailed, must have been executed on the very day of transgression), and the establishment of an order of things which still contained many tokens of divine goodness, gave evidence of thoughts of mercy and loving-kindness in God toward man. The explicit assurance that “the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent,” however dimly understood at first, could not fail even then to light up the conviction in the sinful heart, that it was the purpose of God to aid man in obtaining a recovery from the ruin of the fall. But this must evidently be done in a way of grace. All natural good had been forfeited by the fall, and death—the utter destruction of life and blessing—had become the common doom of humanity. Whatever inheritance, therefore, of good, or whatever opportunity of acquiring it, might be again presented, could be traced to no other source than the divine beneficence. P. F.

24. And he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword, which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.** The remarkable matter in this statement is, that the symbols at the east of Eden were in form precisely the same as those symbols of the immediate Divine presence which marked the place of worship in the subsequent ages of the Church. In the formal establishment of a ritual of worship through Moses, the cherubim with the brightness between them was the specific symbol of the immediate special presence of Jehovah with his worshipping people, and in the subsequent visions of David, Ezekiel and John the same symbols stand forth pre-eminently as the tokens of Jehovah’s presence. So when man is driven out of Eden, no longer to taste of the tree of life, Jehovah not only gives him ordinances of worship, but sets up for him the symbols of His presence to commune with him in the worship. It was, doubtless, at the gate of Eden that Adam came to offer the appointed sacrifices and consult Jehovah, just as afterward the worshippers at the tabernacle and the temple came to worship, at the immediate dwelling-place of Jehovah. It was before this symbol that Abel brought his offering, and, by the coming forth of the brightness to consume it, he saw that “Jehovah had respect unto it.” It was from this “presence of the Lord,” that Cain “went out” when he became an apostate. Thus when man the sinner is driven out of Eden and no longer allowed to “eat of the tree of life,” it is not to utter hopelessness and irretrievable doom. S. R.

If the appearance of the Edenic cherubim denoted the reality of the Divine presence, the following are some of the great truths which the arrangement significantly expressed: That although God had shown himself justly offended with sinful man, and that He could not be disobeyed with impunity, yet He had not withdrawn from the world, but was still “a God near at hand and not afar off.” That restoration to immortal life was not impossible. Such impossibility might have been emphatically signified by destroying the sign of immortality—the tree of life. But that being allowed to stand, the thing signified by it might be supposed to remain also. The presence of the sword-flame in the way which led to the sacred pledge, however, denoted man’s utter forfeiture of the blessing, and that if it ever became his, it could only be by an act of sovereign mercy. And thus the ever-speaking symbol proclaimed both the justice and the grace of God, and tended to keep alive in the human breast the emotions of penitence for the past and of hope for the future. It formed, in connection with the first promise and the institute of sacrifice, an organic part of the new outline of the Divine manifestation. J. H.

The sword, with its flaming brightness and revolving movements, might be suspended there simply as the emblem of God’s avenging justice, and as the instrument of man’s exclusion from the region of life. In that one service the end of its appointment might be fulfilled, and its symbolical meaning exhausted. Such appears to have been the case. But the cherubim, which also had a place assigned them toward the east of the garden, must have had some further use, as the sword alone would have been sufficient to prevent access to the forbidden region. The cherubim must have been added for the purpose of rendering more complete the instruction intended to be conveyed to man by means of the symbolical apparatus here presented to his contemplation. P. F.

The cherubim. According to the exact rendering: “And He placed (or, made to dwell) at the east of the garden of Eden the cherubim”—not certain unknown figures or imaginary existences, but the specific forms of being, familiarly designated by that name.

1. As to the form and appearance of the cherubim, there is nothing definite in the earlier Scriptures, nor are the accounts in the later perfectly uniform. They are uniform in two leading respects, which may be regarded as the more important elements in the cherubic form. (1) They had the predominating appearance of a man. (2) With the form of a man, other animal forms were combined—those of the lion, the ox, and the eagle. These three creatures, along with man, make up together the most perfect forms of animal existence. And hence the old Jewish proverb: “Four are the highest in the world—the lion among wild beasts, the ox among tame cattle, the eagle among birds, man among all (creatures); but God is supreme over all.” The meaning is, that in these four kinds are exhibited the highest forms of creature-life on earth, but that God is still infinitely exalted above these; since all creature-life springs out of His fulness, and is dependent on His hand. So that a creature compounded of all these—bearing in its general shape and structure the lineaments of a man, but associating with the human the appearance and properties also of the three next highest orders of animal existence—might seem a kind of concrete manifestation of created life on earth—a sort of personified creaturehood. It is an ideal combination; and we can think of no reason why the singular combination it presents of animal forms, should have been set upon that of man as the trunk and centre of the whole, unless it were to exhibit the higher elements of humanity in some kind of organic connection with certain distinctive properties of the inferior creation. The nature of man is incomparably the highest upon earth, and towers loftily above all the rest by powers peculiar to itself. And yet we can easily conceive how this very nature of man might be greatly raised and ennobled, by having superadded to its own inherent qualities those of which the other animal forms now before us stand as the appropriate types. Thus the lion among ancient nations generally, and in particular among the Hebrews, was the representative of king-like majesty and peerless strength. So the eagle is king among birds, and stands pre-eminent in the two properties that more peculiarly distinguish the winged creation—those of vision and flight. Finally, the ox was among the ancients the common image of patient labor and productive energy. Assuming these points, we are warranted to think of the cherubim as presenting in their composite structure, and having as the very basis of that structure the form of man—the only being on earth that is possessed of a rational and moral nature; yet combining along with this, and organically uniting to it, the animal representatives of majesty and strength, winged velocity, patient and productive labor.

2. A second point of inquiry respects the designations applied to the cherubim in Scripture. The term cherubim itself being the more common and specific of these, would naturally call for consideration first, if any certain key could be found to its correct import. But the term cherub may now be confidently assigned to that class of words whose original import is involved in hopeless obscurity. There is another designation, however, originally applied to them by Ezekiel, and the sole designation given to them in the Apocalypse, from which some additional light may be derived. This expression is in the original living ones, or living creatures. The Septuagint uses the quite synonymous term zoa; and this, again, is the word uniformly employed by John, when speaking of the cherubim. The frequency with which this name is used of the cherubim is remarkable. In Ezekiel and the Apocalypse together it occurs nearly thirty times, and may consequently be regarded as peculiarly expressive of the symbolical character of the cherubim. It presents them to our view as exhibiting the property of life in its highest state of power and activity; therefore, as creatures altogether instinct with life.

3. The positions assigned to the cherubim in Scripture are properly but two, and, by having regard only to what is essential in the matter, they might possibly be reduced to one. They are the garden of Eden, and the dwelling-place or throne of God in the tabernacle. The first local residence in which the cherubim appear was the garden of Eden—the earthly paradise. What, however, was this but the proper home and habitation of life? of life generally, but emphatically of the divine life! Everything there seemed to breathe the air and to exhibit the fresh and blooming aspect of life. Streams of water ran through it to supply all its productions with nourishment, and keep them in perpetual healthfulness; multitudes of living creatures roamed amid its bowers, and the tree of life, at once the emblem and the seal of immortality, rose in the centre, as if to shed a vivifying influence over the entire domain. Most fitly was it called by the Rabbins, “the land of life.” But it was life in the higher sense—life, not merely as opposed to bodily decay and dissolution, but as opposed also to sin, which brings death to the soul. Eden was the garden of delight, which God gave to man as the image of Himself, the possessor of that spiritual and holy life which has its fountainhead in God. And the moment man ceased to fulfil the part required of him, and yielded himself to the service of unrighteousness, he lost his heritage of blessing, and was driven forth as an heir of mortality and corruption from the hallowed region of life. When, therefore, the cherubim were set in the garden to occupy the place which man had forfeited by his transgression, it was impossible but that they should be regarded as the representatives, not of life merely, but of the life that is in God, and in connection with which evil cannot dwell.

The other position assigned to the cherubim is in immediate connection with the dwelling-place and throne of God. In the inner sanctuary Moses was commanded to make two cherubim, one on each end of the ark of the covenant, and to place them so that they should stand with outstretched wings, their faces toward each other, and toward the mercy-seat, the lid of the ark, which lay between them. That mercy-seat, or the space immediately above it, bounded on either side by the cherubim, and covered by their wings, was the throne of God, as the God of the Old Covenant, the ideal seat of the divine commonwealth in Israel. “There,” said God to Moses, “will I meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the mercy-seat, from between the two cherubim which are upon the ark of the testimony, of all things which I will give thee in commandment to the children of Israel.” This is the fundamental passage regarding the connection of the cherubim with the throne of God; and it is carefully to be noted, that while the seat of the divine presence and glory is said to be above the mercy-seat, it is also said to be between the cherubim. The same form of expression is used also in another passage in the Pentateuch, which may likewise be called a fundamental one: “And when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation (the tent of meeting) to speak with Him, then he heard the voice of one speaking unto him from off the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of testimony, from between the two cherubim.” Hence the Lord was represented as the God “who dwelleth between the cherubim,” according to our version and correctly as to the sense; though the more exact rendering would be, the God who dwelleth in (inhabiteth), or occupies (viz., as a throne or seat) the cherubim. It thus appears that the kind of life which was symbolized by the cherubim was life most nearly and essentially connected with God—life as it is, or shall be, held by those who dwell in His immediate presence, and form the very inclosure and covering of His throne: pre-eminently, therefore, spiritual and holy life. Holiness becomes God’s house in general; and of necessity it rises to its highest creaturely representation in those who are regarded as compassing about the most select and glorious portion of the house—the seat of the living God.

4. As to the kinds of agency attributed to the cherubim. In connection with the garden of Eden, it is merely said that the cherubim were made to dwell at the east of the garden, and a flaming sword, turning every way, to keep the way to the tree of life. The two instruments—the cherubim and the sword—are associated together in regard to this keeping. And the most natural thought is, that as in the keeping there was a twofold idea, so a twofold representation was given to it: that the occupancy was more immediately connected with the cherubim, and the defence against intrusion with the flaming sword. One does not see otherwise what need there could have been for both. Nor is it possible to conceive how the ends in view could otherwise have been served. It was beyond all doubt for man’s spiritual instruction that such peculiar instruments were employed at the east of the garden of Eden, to awaken and preserve in his bosom right thoughts of the God with whom he had to do. But an image of terror and repulsion was not alone sufficient for this. There was needed along with it an image of mercy and hope; and both were given in the appearances that actually presented themselves. When the eye of man looked to the sword, with its burnished and fiery aspect, he could not but be struck with awe at the thought of God’s severe and retributive justice. But when he saw at the same time, in near and friendly connection with that emblem of Jehovah’s righteousness, living or life-like forms of being cast pre-eminently in his own mould, but bearing along with his likeness also of the choicest species of the animal creation around him—when he saw this, what could he think but that still for creatures of earthly rank, and for himself most of all, an interest was reserved by the mercy of God in the things that pertained to the blessed region of life? That region could not now, by reason of sin, be actually held by him; but it was provisionally held—by composite forms of creature life, in which his nature appeared as the predominating element. And with what design, if not to teach that when that nature of his should have nothing to fear from the avenging justice of God, it should regain its place in the holy and blissful haunts from which it had meanwhile been excluded? So that, standing before the eastern approach to Eden, and scanning with intelligence the appearances that there presented themselves to his view, the child of faith might say to himself, That region of life is not finally lost to me. It has neither been blotted from the face of creation, nor intrusted to natures of another sphere. Earthly forms still hold possession of it. Such a line of reflection manifestly lay within the reach of the earliest members of a believing seed; especially since the light it is supposed to have conveyed was only supplementary to that embodied in the first grand promise to the fallen, that the seed of the woman should bruise the head of the serpent.

But the information in this line, and by means of these materials, reaches its furthest limit, when, in the Apocalyptic vision of a triumphant Church, the four and twenty elders, who represent her, are seen sitting in royal state and crowned majesty close beside the throne, with the cherubic forms in and around it. There, at last, the ideal and the actual freely meet together—the merely symbolical representatives of the life of God, and its real possessors, the members of a redeemed and glorified Church. And the inspiring element of the whole, that which at once explains all and connects all harmoniously together, is the central object appearing there of “a Lamb, as if it had been slain, in the midst of the throne, and of the four living creatures, and in the midst of the elders.” Here the mystery resolves itself; in this consummate wonder all other wonders cease, all difficulties vanish. The Lamb of God, uniting together heaven and earth, human guilt and divine mercy, man’s nature and God’s perfections, has opened a pathway for the fallen to the very height and pinnacle of being. And when the better country breaks upon our view—when the new heavens and the new earth supplant the old, then also the ideal gives way to the real. We see another paradise with its river and tree of life, a present God and a presiding Saviour, holy angels and a countless multitude of redeemed spirits rejoicing in the fulness of blessing and glory provided for them; but no sight is anywhere to be seen of the cherubim of glory. They have fulfilled the end of their temporary existence, and vanish like the guiding stars of night before the bright sunshine of eternal day.

To sum up, then: The cherubim were in their very nature and design artificial and temporary forms of being—uniting in their composite structure the distinctive features of the highest kinds of creaturely existence on earth—man’s first and chiefly. They were set up for representations, to the eye of faith, of earth’s living creaturehood, and more especially of its rational and immortal though fallen head, with reference to the better hopes and destiny in prospect. From the very first they gave promise of a restored condition to the fallen; and by the use afterward made of them the light became clearer and more distinct. By their designations, the positions assigned them, the actions from time to time ascribed to them, as well as their own peculiar structure, it was intimated that the good in prospect should be secured in perfect consistence with the claims of God’s righteousness; that restoration to the holiness must precede restoration to the blessedness of life; and that only by being made capable of dwelling beside the presence of the only Wise and Good could man hope to have his portion of felicity recovered. But all this, they further betokened, it was in God’s purpose to have accomplished; and so to do it as at the same time to raise humanity to a higher than its original destination—in its standing nearer to God, and with its powers of life and capacities of working variously ennobled. P. F.

Four fundamental principles or doctrines are strikingly exhibited by the historical transactions connected with the fall: human guilt and depravity; God’s righteous character and government; His grace necessary to open the door of hope: and finally, the principle of headship, by which the offspring of a common parent were associated in a common ruin, and by which again, under a new and better constitution, the heirs of blessing might be associated in a common restoration. In these elementary principles, however, we have rather the basis of the patriarchal religion than the religion itself. For this we must look to the symbols and institutions of worship. And as far as appears from the records of that early time, the materials out of which these had at first to be fashioned were: The position assigned to man in respect to the tree of life, the placing before him of the cherubim and the flaming sword at the east of Eden, the covering of his guilt by the sacrifice of animal life, and his still subsisting relation to the day of rest originally hallowed and blessed by God. To this last may be added the marmarriage relationship; for here also the general principle holds, that no formal change was introduced after the fall, and what was done at the first was virtually done for all times. P. F.

When our first parents left the garden of Eden, they carried with them the promise of a Redeemer, the assurance of the final defeat of the great enemy, as well as the Divine institution of a Sabbath on which to worship, and of the marriage-bond by which to be joined together into families. Thus the foundations of the Christian life in all its bearings were laid in Paradise. A. E.