SERMON I.

GENESIS iii. 22.

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.

THIS is declared to be man's condition after the Fall. I will not attempt to penetrate into that which is not to be entered into, nor to pretend to discover all that may be concealed beneath the outward, and in many points clearly parabolical, form of the account of man's temptation and sin. But that condition to which his sin brought him is our condition; with that, undoubtedly, we are concerned; that must be the foundation of all sound views of human nature; the double fact implied in the word fall is of the last importance; the fact on the one hand of our present nature being evil, the fact on the other

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2 WHAT THE doctrine of MAN'S FALL teaches.

hand that this present nature is not our proper nature; that the whole business of our lives is to cast it off, and to return to that better and holy nature, which, in truth, although not in fact, is the proper nature of man.

All individual experience, then, and all history begins in something which is evil all our course, whether as individuals or as nations, is a progress, an advance, a leaving behind us something bad, and a going forwards towards something that is good. But individual experience, and history apart from Christianity, would make us regard this progress as fearfully uncertain. Clear it is that we are in an evil case; we have lost our way; we are like men who are bewildered in those endless forests of reeds which line some of the great American rivers; if we stay where we are, the venomous snakes may destroy us; or the deadly marsh air when night comes on will be surely fatal; it is death to remain, but yet if we move, we know not what way will lead us out, and it may be that, while seeming to advance, we shall but be going round and round, and shall at last find ourselves hard by the place from which we set out in the beginning. Nay, we may even feel a doubt, a doubt, I say, though not a reasonable belief,-but a doubt which at times would press us sorely, whether the tangled thicket in which we are placed has any end at

THAT OUR PRESENT STATE IS NOT NATURAL, 3

all; whether our fond notions of a clear and open space, a pure air, and a fruitful and habitable country, are not altogether merely imaginary; whether the whole world be not such a region of death as the spot in which we are actually prisoned; whether there remains any thing for us, but to curse our fate, and lie down and die. Under such circumstances, although we should admire the spirit which hoped against hope; which would make an effort for deliverance; which would, at any rate, flee from the actual evil, although other evil might receive him after all his struggles; yet we could forgive those who yielded at once to their fate, and who sat down quietly to wait for their death, without the unavailing labour of a struggle to avoid it.

But when the declaration has been made to us by God himself, that this dismal swamp in which we are prisoners, is but an infinitely small portion of his universe, that there do exist all those goodly forms which we fancied; and more, when God declares too that we were in the first instance designed to enjoy them; that our error brought us into the thicket, having been once out of it; that we may escape from it again; nay, much more still, when he shows us the true path to escape, and tells us, that the obstacles in our way have been cleared, and that He will give us strength to accomplish the task of

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NOR ACTUALLY INEVITABLE.

escaping, and will guide us that we do not miss the track; then what shall we say to those who insist upon remaining where they are, but that they are either infatuated, or indolent and cowardly even to insanity; that they are refusing certain salvation, and are, by their own act, giving themselves over to inevitable death.

This, then, is the truth taught us by the doctrine of the Fall; not so much that it is our certain destruction to remain where we are, for that our own sense and reason declare to us, if we will but listen to them; but that our present position is not that for which God designed us, and that to rest satisfied with it is not a yielding to an unavoidable necessity, but the indolently or madly shrinking from the effort which would give us certain deliverance.

Now it is a part of our present evil condition from which we must escape, that we know good and evil. We are in a world where evil exists within us, and about us; we cannot but know it. True it is, that it was our misfortune to become acquainted with it; this noisome wilderness of reeds, this reeking swamp; it would have been far happier for us, no doubt, had we never become aware of their existence. But that wish is now too late. We are in the midst of this dismal place, and the question now is, how to escape from it. We may shut our eyes, and say we will not see

IGNORANCE NOW IS NOT INNOCENCE.

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objects so unsightly; but what avails it, if the marsh poison finds its way by other senses, if we cannot but draw it in with our breath, and so we must die. And such is the case of those who now in this present world confound ignorance with innocence. This is a fatal mistaking of our present condition for our past: there was a time when to the human race ignorance was innocence; but now, it is only folly and sin. For as I supposed that a man lost in one of those noxious swamps might shut his eyes, and so keep himself in some measure in ignorance, yet the poison would be taken in with his breath, and so he would die: even thus, whilst we would fain shut the eyes of our understanding, and would so hope to be in safety, our passions are all the time alive and active, and they catch the poison of the atmosphere around us, and we are not innocent, but foolishly wicked.

We must needs consider this carefully; for, to say nothing of wider questions of national importance, who that sees before him, as we must see it, the gradual change from childhood to boyhood, who that sees added knowledge often accompanied with added sin, can help wishing that the earlier ignorance of evil might still be continued; and fancying that knowledge is at best but a doubtful blessing.

But our path is not backwards, but onwards.