with evil, and on whom its dark and baleful shadows can have no power. And hence, too, arises the need of a Divine clothing, or that imparted and supernatural grace by which the creature faculties, naked in themselves, are invested with a new life, and put on the beautiful garments of a living and heaven-imparted righteousness.

It results from these remarks, that the sentence of the Judge is no mere irony, as many have held it to be, and have thereby obscured the calm and almost plaintive dignity of the simple announcement-" Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil." They have already been dealt with as criminals, for their wilful rebellion. They have now to be dealt with as creatures whose intellect has become at once enlarged and diseased, by tasting of the tree of knowledge. They would now have learned, by the bitter effects of the forbidden tree, and the plain contrast with the tree of life, to long, if possible, to repair their error, by tasting of the tree which they had neglected before, and which would then have been a pledge of immortality. But the type was now shattered by their sin; and what before might have conveyed or preserved life, both for the body and the spirit, could now exercise its virtue upon the body alone. The inner and higher blessing had been sundered, when sin entered into that Paradise, which had once been a type of heaven. And now immortality in the flesh would be a curse, and not a blessing, and would seal down the fallen spirit in its guilt, like the rebellious angels, without the hope of redemption,

Hence the expulsion was an act of mingled mercy and justice of justice with reference to the original standing of man in Paradise, and of mercy when considered in the light of his actual fall. It is not now in yielding to the instinctive desires of His fallen creatures, that the Almighty can manifest the reality and depth of His own love. It must rather be proved by that severe and wholesome discipline, which teaches them the exceeding bitterness of rebellion against their Maker; and, writing vanity and vexation of spirit upon all the joys of sense, shuts them up to the earnest longing for the promised Redeemer of the lost, and for their own restoration to the Divine image, when they shall have access once more to the tree of life which blooms for ever in the midst of the heavenly Paradise.

CHAPTER VII.

ON THE PERMISSION OF SATANIC TEMPTATION.

ONE great perplexity, in the History of the Fall, remains to be noticed; and it is so intimately connected with the later course of Providence, as revealed in Scripture, that it calls for separate consideration. Why was the mighty Tempter permitted to ply his arts upon our first parents, to their ruin? And why, since the Fall, has the same mysterious agency of evil been suffered still to work busily from age to age, as if the Most High designed to aggravate, to the uttermost, the moral calamities of a fallen race?

We are not at liberty here, without evident falsehood, to resort to the supposition of any strict, absolute, and metaphysical impossibility. The Prince of evil, as a creature, must be under the control of the Almighty Creator; and He who will at last make His sword to approach him in judgment, and execute upon him the sentence of doom, must have been able, from the first, to interdict him entirely from the exercise of his murderous arts, either on our first parents, or on the later generations of mankind. We have here to contemplate an exercise of Divine wisdom, not in the recognition of an eternal necessity,

anterior to any positive act of the Supreme Will; but in a sovereign choice, where either alternative, in its own nature, was equally possible. There is no natural, necessary, inevitable connexion between Satanic agency and human probation. The malignant Adversary and Tempter might, from the first moment of his fall, have been sealed in the abyss, and prohibited from all active efforts to deceive the nations. How can we account, then, for the solemn fact which Scripture reveals, that he was permitted to enter even in Paradise, and has continued to exercise his powerful seductions through the long course of six thousand years?

Now it must be plain, first of all, that every arbitrary restraint on the activity of free agents, except as a penal visitation for open crime, must so far violate the simplicity and dignity of God's moral government. The creatures were formed to display the Divine glory. And this can only be by the development of their own powers, so that they may be blessed and a mutual blessing in the right improvement of them, and only in the case of their deliberate abuse, the Divine justice be revealed in their deserved punishment. There seems no middle course, consistent with a just conception of the Divine wisdom, between the refusal to create, lest the gift of existence should be abused, or the concession of liberty to every moral agent to manifest freely its own character up to the time of actual judgment, in the full assurance that the wisdom of God can overrule all their acts and purposes, whether good or evil, for some final issue worthy of His own greatness. On this ground alone, it is diffi

cult to see how the Infinite Wisdom could have interdicted the Prince of evil from all activity of seduction, unless by executing the sentence upon him at once for his original crime. But surely the Divine forbearance and righteousness will both receive a more signal display by the course of government which Scripture reveals, than if judgment had been inflicted at once upon the lost archangel, before his malice had been proved, in all its intensity of guilt, by his persevering conspiracy against the peace, order, and happiness of the whole moral universe.

But does not such a course wear an aspect of cruelty towards Man himself, the object of these spiritual temptations? Here the question will arise-Were these temptations due to Satan alone, or would they have still existed, had the Tempter been sealed in the abyss? The true answer is self-evident. The secret and inevitable spring of temptation was in man himself, and neither in the Creator nor in the great Adversary. "Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man. But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed." The form and circumstances of the trial alone were affected by the permitted activity of Satan. Its substance must have been the same, if the Tempter had never appeared on the scene. The knowledge of good and evil, in their height and depth, as they exist in the region of eternal possibility, would have been equally fatal. The liability of the finite intellect to long after this dangerous know