This change in the body was accompanied by a general deterioration of the mental and spiritual powers; the reason began to be clouded; the affections to run riot; the will to be enfeebled and warped.

2. Spiritual death, so called by analogy, viz., the loss of that grace of the Holy Spirit which had been given to man at his creation, which was the life of the life of his created spirit, the bond which held all his powers together in harmonious perfectness, and which formed the crown and glory of his being.

3. Eternal death, a term also used by analogy, viz., the deprivation of the eternal life which had been held out to Adam as the blessed conclusion of his successful probation.

"In the day that thou eatest thereof." True, the forbidden fruit was not a physical poison; Adam and Eve did not fall dead on the ground when they tasted of it. But from that hour man was mortal, and the process of natural decay began its unimpeded work upon him; from that hour the grace of God fled; from that hour the promise of eternal life was forfeited.

We see the symptoms of the change at once, in shame and fear and hate, even before the sentence has been pronounced upon them. Shame, they knew that they were naked; fear, they hid themselves from the presence of God; hate, shown in their mutual recriminations.

Thus "sin entered into the world, and death by sin." "Sin is the transgression of the law," the discord between the creature's will and the will of the Creator. It is a kind of spiritual poison, which naturally fills the soul with disease and death.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE COVENANT OF REDEMPTION.

In the evening of the day of the fall our fallen parents "heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden;" from which we gather that God habitually condescended to manifest Himself to them in some such visible shape as that in which He appeared to Abraham at his tent-door in Mamre, and to converse with them as with him, "face to face, as a man talketh with his friend."

"And they hid themselves," for they were afraid of God. But God called them forth from their concealment, and brought them to conviction and confession of their sin : "Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat?" Adam admitted it; but threw the blame on Eve, with an insinuation that his sin was a result of God's having given him this companion : "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 that thou hast done?" And she confessed the deed, but tried to throw the blame upon another: "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat."

Then God passed sentence upon them: upon the woman increase of sorrow in conception, and subjection to her husband; upon him, hard toil for daily bread, and sorrow in the eating it, and at the end of it death.

But in this assignment of temporal penalty there is hope, in that God does not simply leave them alone to the conse

quences of their sin. In His appearing to them, questioning them, bringing them to confession of sin, and assigning the penalty for it, we see that He is still their God; that He has renewed His relations with His fallen creature.

Two brief passages, when carefully examined, reveal to us much more than this. In the text, "I will put enmity between thee (Satan) and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel,” the Church has always recognised the condensed record of the first obscure promise of a Redeemer, who should destroy Satan and his power. It was the giving of the Gospel to Adam.

Again the text, "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them," reveals to us that faith in this Saviour constituted the central doctrine of the religion of fallen man; and the showing forth that faith in His atoning blood, and pleading it before the throne of God, constituted the central act of his worship.

This will need some explanation. The first act of worship clearly recorded in Holy Scripture was when "in process of time it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord; and Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock, and of the fat thereof." By the light reflected back on this passage from the subsequent history of religious worship, we see that these things were offered as sacrifices; and the phrase, “with the fat thereof," compared with the express directions for sacrifice given in Leviticus,* indicates that, at this early period, the rite of sacrifice was practised in the same way as by the

* “Aaron's sons shall burn it on the altar upon the burnt sacrifice, which is upon the wood that is on the fire: it is an offering made by fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord. . . . All the fat is the Lord's " (Lev. iii. 5, 16).

Israelites under the law of Moses, and doubtless with the same general meaning.

What did this rite of sacrifice mean? It meant this: 1. That the wages of sin is death; 2. That without shedding of blood there is no remission; 3. That the blood of an innocent victim would be accepted in the sinner's stead; 4. The victim was a type of Christ.

When Abel stood before his altar, and offered his lamb for a burnt offering before God, he showed his faith in the promised Saviour, in His atoning blood, and he pleaded that precious blood before the mercy-seat of God.

This act of worship is mentioned incidentally, as the occasion of the death of Abel; there is no reason to suppose that it was the first sacrifice ever offered. On the contrary, the words, "in process of time," literally, "after the days," imply that Cain and Abel came after a known recurring period of time for their customary worship, probably at the end of seven days, i.e., on the Sabbath; for the Sabbath had already in paradise been instituted as a holy day. Moreover, a consideration of the meaning of Abel's sacrifice would lead us to the conclusion that this was not the first instance of it. Adam had the same need to come before God with a sacrifice for sin as his sons had. And in looking back for the time when this rite may probably have begun, we can see no time short of that when the necessity for a sin-offering arose, viz., when Adam sinned.

Again, how came Abel, or Adam before him, to adopt this mode of worshipping God? It is very unlikely that it should suggest itself to the mind of any man, who had such a knowledge of God as they had, that it would be an acceptable act of worship to Him to take one of His creatures, and slay it, and burn it, "with the fat thereof," on a pile of stones. It is very unlikely that men should have invented such a mode of representing before God

those truths which we have said were symbolised in sacrifice. The only probable explanation of the rite is, that God taught it to men, in order to keep those truths prominent before their minds. This is the more probable since we know that God did subsequently dictate the details of a sacrifice to Abraham (Gen. xv. 9); He did call upon Abraham for the sacrifice of his son; He did teach the Israelites the Passover ceremonial; He did reveal to Moses the minute ordinances of the levitical sacrifices. Putting all these things together, there is a high probability that God first taught Adam this mode of showing forth the death of Christ, and pleading His merits before the throne of grace.

When we look again into the sacred history in search of some record of the origin of this rite, which occupies so prominent a position in the religions of mankind, we find it in the passage which we are considering: "Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

Whence came these skins? Not from animals slain for food, for God at first gave man only the cereals and fruits for food (“every herb bearing seed, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed,” Gen. i. 29); it was not until after the flood that He gave them "every moving thing that liveth for food” (Gen. ix. 3), with the religious restriction that they should not eat “the life thereof, which is the blood thereof." The only other purpose for which animals were slain was sacrifice.

The only probable answer to the question, Whence came the skins of the animals with which God clothed Adam and Eve? is, that they were slain as sacrifices. And with this clue the whole passage stands out with beautiful clearness and significance. After the fall, as we have seen, God appeared to Adam and Eve, hiding themselves in