direct retribution upon the devil as the responsible agent. His first sin was not man's sin, though in close connection with it. The malicious temptation was demoniac; the yielding to sense-gratification was human; and sin entered humanity in the latter only, not at all in the former. Other spirits with the devil, and through his instigation, followed in rebellion against God and malignity towards man; and the terrible conflict here began between man's tempter and man's Deliverer that is finally to issue in the destruction of the devil and his designs; but the fall of humanity was sense-gratification against conscious obligation.

The first human sin was woman's, incipiently in her listening and leaning to temptation, and fully consummated in the outer act of eating the fruit which God and conscience prohibited. The sin of inducing. Adam was Eve's, but that of assenting and eating was his, and in the deliberate transgressions of both the entire humanity was ruined. Conjunct humanity, created male and female, conjointly sinned and debased itself in its primitive stock. The spirit subjected itself to the sense by its own act. Its trial was a necessity in the case itself, and required as a special formal arrangement by the best interest of man and the benevolence of God; paternally supervised and ordered by Jehovah, in a way that opened the best and freest occasion conceivable for confirmation in virtue, and yet eventuating in a sensual instead of a spiritual disposition. The essence of the

sin and fall of humanity was in this primitive disposing of itself upon the end of sense-gratification; and this could not be from any other agency than the human itself. The devil did not, and could not do it, for humanity; God did not originate it; man only did or could make himself a sinner. The mystery of original sin does not lie in the subject who committed it, but in the Creator who made the being capable of originating it. And this can find its solution only in the consideration that, to have beings capable of virtue, involves also capability of sinning; and, as reason demands the former, it must, even in sadness for the issue, leave the door open to the latter.

SECTION III.

THE CHANGES INDUCED BY THE SIN OF MAN.

SIN has entered humanity and debased it, and in connection with man sin has also first reached the world of higher spirits, and the ruin is both widespread and dreadful. How God deals with lost angels we do not here inquire, although as their sin was in connection with his, so there is full evidence that God's dealings with man were designed to throw their influence upon other worlds. God's moral universe is one as truly as the material, and what occurs in one

part is to have its bearing on others; and to angelic spirits, confirmed in virtue or fallen, the field of humanity is doubtless more fully in their view, than the spheres in which they move are to us mortals. We therefore cannot learn from them, as they learn from God's way with us; but to us, gleams of revealed light disclose that good angels rejoice in man's recov ery, and sinful angels are confounded at his redemption. Principalities and powers in heavenly places read the manifold wisdom of God in what through long ages he is doing for his Church, and for the lost world in the extension of his mediatorial kingdom. The single world of human inhabitants is a spectacle for all intelligences.

But while we leave other worlds to learn, as they may and do, from God's interpositions towards us, we turn with strong and saddened interest to contemplate the changes which the introduction of man's sin has induced. The very knowledge of the fact carries wide changes with it. The conscious sinner is debased and ashamed in his own conviction; and a disturbing blast spreads through the ranks of those yet steadfast. No moral personality stands as he before did. That has come in which all know ought not to have been; and conscious feelings and solicitudes arise which were never stirred before. A loathing and abhorring of the intruding abomination seizes upon all the good, who would fain repel the moral pollution from all approach to them. Anxiety arises as to what is to come of it, and how God will deal

with it; while the remorse and forebodings of the guilty are still more direful. God himself is so affected by it that he cannot stand towards his creation as when no sin was in it. The change is universal and deplorable, and no good being can contemplate the sin and its consequences without rebuke and displeas We shall note these changes more in detail, having reference to the parties affected.

ure.

1. CHANGES ON THE PART OF THE FALLEN MAN AND WOMAN.

1. The radical change is the domination of sense over spirit. The gratification of the forbidden appetite was not a passionate impulse, suddenly breaking out in vehement intensity, and surprising to a desultory assent while the radical disposition was itself unchanged, but it carried the assent of the spirit, and so the perversion of the disposition, along with it. It had been a deliberate rejection of a conscious spiritual claim and a purposed acceptance of sensual indulgence as the chosen good, and such a disposing of the spirit fixed its voluntary state and settled into permanent personal character. This is the comprehensive change in Adam and Eve; they have become carnallyminded; persistently inclined towards sense-indulgence, and a renunciation of the self-respect and conscious peace which, spiritual ascendency perpetuates. The animal part of humanity tyrannizes over the rational, and the spirit consents to the servitude, while every fresh indulgence leaves the spirit poor and

empty, and so fleeing from one gratification to another in constant unrest, continually deluded, and necessarily never satisfied. And such a soul has already in it the baseness, malignity, and desperate hate and enmity infused by the depraved spirit. There needs only the check and stern rebuke of righteous authority, and the "earthly and sensual" soul will manifest in the fiendishness of its spirit that it is also "devilish." The entire selfhood is alien from God, and determined solely to self-serving and indulging.

2. Self-respect and divine trust has changed to shame and fear. The spirit knows its own baseness in consenting to serve the flesh, and in this is essentially the blended shame and remorse of a guilty conscience. The spirit infuses its own bitterness into the sentient soul, and bites back in self-torment with every repeated indulgence. The new gratification stings with a new conviction of vileness, and awakens also the foreboding fears of deserved retributions about to come. The intrinsic excellency and dignity of the spirit, standing in personal responsibility and integrity, Adam and Eve have both manifestly lost. They consent to give up personal prerogative and free selfpossession and full responsibility for what they know to have been respectively their own acts, and which personal prerogative is above all price, and both admit that they have let another control them. "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," says Adam; and “the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat," says Eve; and so