CHAPTER VIII.

THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE.

THIS subject has, like all the rest, perplexed the learning, or provoked the mysticism of interpretation; yet on no topic of Scripture has there been a more remarkable disregard of the obvious rules of inquiry. By some commentators, the tree has been pronounced pregnant with all science; by others a miraculous means of invigorating the human intellect; by others a poison, naturally extinguishing life; by others a sacrament, or visible sign of some influence, to be developed in that higher world of which Eden itself is the representative.

The state of Adam before the Fall is perfectly conceivable, as affording no opportunity for practically learning the distinction of virtue and vice'.

In Scripture, the "knowledge of good and evil" is universally a knowledge of the distinction between virtue and vice. Thus, "Your little ones, which ye said should become a prey, and your children which in that day had no knowledge of good and evil, (infants, too young to know the difference,) shall go

His nature was created pure. The promptings of sin, familiar as they are to our fallen nature almost from the dawn of the human powers, could not have been spontaneously generated in his mind. The trial of his moral capacity was to come; but until it came, and by an external influence, he fell, there was nothing in his condition to invalidate the idea that his will, his understanding, and his senses, existed in the guileless purity that is unconscious of the very existence of sin.

The moral sense had existed before; for it was to this sense alone that the command to abstain from the tree of knowledge, and the threat of penalty, could have been addressed. But it was the first act of disobedience alone that taught the mind the practical distinction between vice and virtue. It was then fearfully felt in the influx of remorse, conscious ingratitude, and the terror of impending

in thither," is the language of Moses to the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness. (Deut. i. 30.) Isaiah, in describing the innocent ignorance of extreme childhood, says, "Before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the good," (before he is capable of making the distinction,) the events predicted shall appear. St. Paul defines the more experienced among the converts, as "those who have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil." (Heb. v. 14.) In any other sense the expression is inapplicable to Adam, for no knowledge of good was gained by the transgression; the only knowledge was of evil. Milton's expression, "knowledge of evil gained and good lost," describes the fact; but the phrase in the original is content with expressing the distinction.

destruction. The contrast and the pain are still, in a qualified degree, constantly occurring among mankind. It is equally consistent with human experience, that the pain of the discovery should not have been left to mere reflection; but that the crime should, in some measure, ensure its own punishment. Thus, the eating of the fruit is distinctly declared to have produced a real change in human sensation; which, whether a sudden sense of impetuous blood, or a general fever of the faculties, or an agonizing pang of conscience and shame, was felt by the offenders as the beginning of vengeance.

The progress of the narrative sustains the same consistency with common nature. The first act of the criminal is generally to deny all consciousness of crime; the second, to throw the guilt on his associates. When the man and the woman are summoned before the Divine Judge, their first answer is an equivocation" I heard thy voice in the garden, and was afraid, because I was naked'.'

It has been conceived, that notwithstanding the guilt of the first crime, it advanced the criminals to a more beneficial grade of moral knowledge, and that the discovery of the necessity of clothing was in itself a proof of a newly acquired sense of propriety. But against this stands the insurmountable objection, that God had expressly prohibited the act from which those advantages are supposed to flow. Doubtless HE can extract good from evil by his own resistless interference, but good cannot flow from evil by the course of nature. That man, by his crime, acquired an accession of knowledge, is allowed; for every act of

On the detection of the subterfuge, all other feelings are lost in terror, a terror probably never equalled in the history of human agony, for what other human beings ever stood in the visible presence of an offended God? Adam then throws his guilt on Eve; Eve alike throws her guilt on the Tempter, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." The Tempter is not questioned; his native iniquity is already known. Sentence is passed upon him first, and without mitigation; a twofold ruin. In his animal form he is degraded to the condition of a reptile, and of all reptiles, the most abhorred; in his spiritual nature he is destined to

guilt, as every act of human life, is an accession of knowledge, however ruinous. The man who proceeds from robbery to murder adds to his knowledge, but such knowledge is not an addition to his moral sensibility, but to the hardening of the heart; not a benefit, but an undoing.

It has been already shown that man possessed a moral sense from the beginning, implied in the command of obedience to a Divine restriction. The propriety of clothing for concealment was suggested by a sense of shame, but that sense of shame was suggested by a sense of sin; its non-adoption in the earlier. state of Paradise was not the result of an insensibility to the dictates or delicacy of nature; for we cannot discover, on natural principles, why any one portion of the human frame should more require concealment than another. That a sense of the fitness of concealment now exists is of course acknowledged, but it is a sense altogether connected with the results of the original transgression, and arguing a change from the perfect purity of our first nature.

be overthrown by the descendant of the woman. This sentence could not have been directed to a mere brute;-because it is declared as a punishment for sin, of which the brute nature is incapable-because enmity is declared to subsist between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent, of which the brute nature could have no comprehension-and because the tempter, as distinguished from his offspring, is to war with a Being whose birth was still distant four thousand years: a circumstance obviously incompatible with animal life.

All the characteristics of the prediction too, are evidently pointed so as to baffle and mortify the pride of a malignant spiritual adversary. He has overcome by fraud, he is to be overcome by fortitude, not to be beguiled, but to be crushed in open combat; he has exulted in the ruin of the world, he is to be destroyed by a Being born of the world; he has made woman his first victim, and from woman, by an especial and exclusive birth, is to come the subverter of his power.

The severity of changing the serpent's form, was nothing, as an infliction on the mere brute. From all that we can discover of animal sensation, all the lower animals are equally happy. They have the full measure of enjoyment suited to their condition. The serpent creeping in the dust, is probably enjoying all the happiness that