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SERMON X.

THE TEMPTATION AND FALL.

GENESIS iii. 5.

"God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

I INTEND, in dependence upon God's blessing, to dwell this evening upon the fall of our first parents-why God permitted it, how it took place and I shall endeavour to show that the account of it in God's word is not an allegory, story, or fable, veiling something deeper or truer, but that it bears every mark of being an exact record of what actually took place, a narrative thoroughly consistent with itself and with the circumstances in which we may reasonably suppose the first of such a race in such a world as ours would be placed.

When God created man at the first He created him very good. He created him, then, with every faculty of body and soul just in the state that it should be. His body was strong, vigorous, active, having no seeds of disease. or decay in it. His body, too, must have been in subjection to his mind, his reason, his better part. There was no striving of the inferior desires of his body against the superior judg

ment of his reasonable soul. For instance, he had no temptation to eat or drink beyond what was required for the sustenance of his body. His spirit, too, must have been in the state in which God intended it to be, so that it should delight in having communion with its Maker. God had made the spirit of man capable of discerning Him and conversing with Him, and so, no doubt, man's spirit before the fall loved God who had so loved him as to give him such a beautiful world to live in, and set him over all the other works of His hands. It is evident also, that God created Adam with other high faculties of soul. He created his soul very wise, searching, and intelligent. This is quite clear from the fact that God entrusted to Adam the naming of all the inferior creatures ;* and it is said that "whatsoever Adam called any living creature that was the name thereof." Now we must remember, that in the language which, no doubt, Adam spoke-for his own name and the name of his wife are words of that language-the name of almost every thing is derived from some distinguishing quality which it possesses; so when Adam gave a name to each animal, he did it not at random, but on account of something that he perceived in it, which made it to differ from all other creatures. In this God

* Aut qui primus, quod summæ sapientiæ Pythagoræ visum est, omnibus rebus imposuit nomina?-Cicero, Tusc. Disp. i. 25, 62.

gave Adam power and wisdom to do as He had done; for as God gave names to the light and the darkness, and the earth and the seas, so Adam in like manner "gave names to all cattle, and the fowl of the air, and the beast of the field." So that when the various creatures were brought to Adam, the wisdom that God had given him made him see in a moment that peculiarity of the creature which distinguished it from all other kinds.

So, then, man was created very good in all respects-having a perfect body in perfect subjection to the spirit, and having a soul or spirit that loved God and conversed with Him, and understood at a glance the wonders of that creation with which he was surrounded. The question now arises, Why did not God so order matters that this happy state of things should continue? Now there is, as I have no doubt the more intelligent of you are aware, an unfathomable depth connected with this, and a thousand things may be asked about it that no man, however great his wisdom or spiritual insight, can even attempt to answer; still there is an aspect of this matter from which some needful instruction may be gathered, though we do not dive into the depth, or attempt to answer any one question which really touches the mystery.

Why, then, did not God so order matters. that all this should continue? Why did He

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allow Adam to be tempted? Why did He not uphold him under the temptation? Because God desires that those creatures to whom He has shown Himself, and who are capable of choosing Him, should choose Him by trusting in Him. So all God's intelligent creatures, no matter what they are, must show their trust in Him. They must show that they know and feel that God is wiser than themselves, and so can order for them better than they can order for themselves. It seems reasonable that God should demand this sort of trust from reasonable creatures who are

capable of knowing Him. But how was

Adam to show this trust? We show this faith or trust by keeping God's commandments when we are tempted by our evil nature to disobey God; for instance, when we are tempted to do wrong by our evil nature, or our evil companions, we say in ourselves," How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God? God has redeemed me in order that I may be happy for ever, so no matter what the pleasures of the sin, I must not indulge in it. My God and my Saviour knows best, and He forbids it." But you see that Adam could not have been tried by the wish to do any of the evil things by which we destroy our souls, for this reason, that he had no inclination to them. For instance, he had no inclination to kill, for there was no death; indeed, he had

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no feeling akin to malice or revenge before he fell, so that there was nothing in him that could induce him to break such a commandment as the sixth. So with the eighth; he had no inclination to take the property of another, because all his wants were supplied in profusion. How was he, then, to be tried? How was he to show his trust in his Maker-that his Maker knew better than he did? Now, God had given to Adam an occupation, which was to dress and keep the garden in which He had placed him; that must have been the natural-indeed, we may almost say, the only -occupation open to him under such circumstances, for if you run over in your minds the different occupations by which men now employ themselves, or get their living, you will see that it was impossible that Adam should pursue them. God would not have made him a carpenter or a builder in a state of things where houses are not required. We live in houses because of the inclemency of the elements-because of the deadly dews of the night air; but if we were not subject to disease and death, and if the air were always balmy and serene, we should want no houses, and none to build them. So he could not have been a soldier, when there was no war; nor a sailor, since Eden was far from the sea; and he could not have been a physician, because there was no disease; nor a lawyer, because there