first roses blew." Streams were necessary to the very existence of an Oriental garden. Hopkins, Script. Idea of Man, 107-"Man includes woman. Creation of a man without a woman would not have been the creation of man. Adam called her name Eve, but God called their name Adam." Mat. Henry: "Not out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled on by him; but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected by him, and near his heart to be beloved."-"The golden conception of a Paradise is the poet's guiding thought." There is a universal feeling that we are not now in our natural state; that we are far away from home; that we are exiles from our true habitation. Keble, Groans of Nature: "Such thoughts, the wreck of Paradise, Through many a dreary age, Upbore whate'er of good or wise Yet lived in bard or sage." Poetry and music echo the longing for some possession lost. Jessica, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: "I am never merry when I hear sweet music." All true poetry is forward-looking or backward-looking prophecy, as sculpture sets before us the original or the resurrection body. See Isaac Taylor, Hebrew Poetry, 94-101; Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 225, 226.

Hegel claimed that the Paradisaic condition is only an ideal conception underlying human development. But may not the traditions of the gardens of Brahma and of the Hesperides embody the world's recollection of an historical fact, when man was free from external evil and possessed all that could minister to innocent joy? The "golden age" of the heathen was connected with the hope of restoration. So the use of the doctrine of man's original state is to convince men of the high ideal once realized, properly belonging to man, now lost, and recoverable, not by man's own powers, but only through God's provision in Christ. For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium, 115. He mentions the following: Hesiod, Works and Days, 109–208; Aratus, Phenom., 100-184; Plato, Tim., 233; Vergil, Ec., 4, Georgics, 1 : 135, Æneid, 8: 314.

(b) Provisions for the trying of man's virtue.-Since man was not yet in a state of confirmed holiness, but rather of simple childlike innocence, he could be made perfect only through temptation. Hence the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:9). The one slight command best tested the spirit of obedience. Temptation did not necessitate a fall. If resisted, it would strengthen virtue. In that case, the posse non peccare would have become the non posse peccare.

Thomasius: "That evil is a necessary transition-point to good, is Satan's doctrine and philosophy." The tree was mainly a tree of probation. It is right for a father to make his son's title to his estate depend upon the performance of some filial duty, as Thaddeus Stevens made his son's possession of property conditional upon his keeping the temperance-pledge. Whether, besides this, the tree of knowledge was naturally hurtful or poisonous, we do not know.

The body of the first

(c) Opportunity of securing physical immortality. man was in itself mortal (1 Cor. 15:44). Science shows that physical life involves decay and loss. But means were apparently provided for checking this decay and preserving the body's youth. This means was the "tree of life" (Gen. 2:9). If Adam had maintained his integrity, the body might have been developed and transfigured, without intervention of death. In other words, the posse non mori might have become a non posse mori.

The tree of life was symbolic of communion with God and of man's dependence upon him. But this, only because it had a physical efficacy. It was sacramental and memorial to the soul, because it sustained the life of the body. Natural immortality without holiness would have been unending misery. Sinful man was therefore shut out from the tree of life, till he could be prepared for it by God's righteousness. Redemption and resurrection not only restore that which was lost, but give what man was originally created to attain: 1 Cor. 15: 45-"The first man Adam became a living soul. The last man Adam became a life-giving spirit"; Rev. 22: 14-"Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have the right to come to the tree of life."

The conclusions we have thus reached with regard to the incidents of man's original state are combated upon two distinct grounds:

1st. The facts bearing upon man's prehistoric condition point to a

development from primitive savagery to civilization. Among these facts may be mentioned the succession of implements and weapons from stone to bronze and iron; the polyandry and communal marriage systems of the lowest tribes; the relics of barbarous customs still prevailing among the most civilized.

For the theory of an originally savage condition of man, see Sir John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, and Origin of Civilization: "The primitive condition of mankind was one of utter barbarism"; but especially L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society, who divides human progress into three great periods, the savage, the barbarian and the civilized. Each of the two former has three states, as follows: I. Savage: 1. Lowest state, marked by attainment of speech and subsistence upon roots. 2. Middle state, marked by fish-food and fire. 3. Upper state, marked by use of the bow and hunting. II. Barbarian: 1. Lower state, marked by invention and use of pottery. 2. Middle state, marked by use of domestic animals, maize, and building stone. 3. Upper state, marked by invention and use of iron tools. III. Civilized man next appears, with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet and writing.

With regard to this view we remark:

(a) It is based upon an insufficient induction of facts.- History shows a law of degeneration supplementing and often counteracting the tendency to development. In the earliest times of which we have any record, we find nations in a high state of civilization; but in the case of every nation whose history runs back of the Christian era-as for example, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians-the subsequent progress has been downward, and no nation is known to have recovered from barbarism except as the result of influence from without.

Lubbock seems to admit that cannibalism was not primeval; yet he shows a general tendency to take every brutal custom as a sample of man's first state. And this, in spite of the fact that many such customs have been the result of corruption. Bride-catching, for example, could not possibly have been primeval, in the strict sense of that term. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:48, presents a far more moderate view. He favors a theory of development, but with degeneration "as a secondary action largely and deeply affecting the development of civilization." So the Duke of Argyll, Unity of Nature: "Civilization and savagery are both the results of evolutionary development; but the one is a development in the upward, the latter in the downward direction; and for this reason, neither civilization nor savagery can rationally be looked upon as the primitive condition of man." Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1: 467 —"As plausible an argument might be constructed out of the deterioration and degradation of some of the human family to prove that man may have evolved downward into an anthropoid ape, as that which has been constructed to prove that he has been evolved upward from one."

"

Modern nations fall far short of the old Greek perception and expression of beauty. Modern Egyptians, Bushmen, Australians, are unquestionably degenerate races. See Lankester, Degeneration The same is true of Italians and Spaniards, as well as of Turks. Abyssinians are now polygamists, though their ancestors were Christians and monogamists. The physical degeneration of portions of the population of Ireland is well known. See Mivart, Lessons from Nature, 146-160, who applies to the savage-theory the tests of language, morals, and religion, and who quotes Herbert Spencer as saying: "Probably most of them [savages], if not all of them, had ancestors in higher states, and among their beliefs remain some which were evolved during those higher states. It is quite possible, and I believe highly probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression." Spencer, however, denies that savagery is always caused by lapse from civilization.

....

Bib. Sac., 6: 715; 29: 282-"Man as a moral being does not tend to rise but to fall, and that with a geometric progress, except he be elevated and sustained by some force from without and above himself. While man once civilized may advance, yet moral ideas are apparently never developed from within." Had savagery been man's primitive condition, he never could have emerged. See Whately, Origin of Civilization, who maintains that man needed not only a divine Creator, but a divine Instructor. Pres. J. H. Seelye, in A Century of Dishonor, 3-"The first missionaries to the Indians in Canada took with them skilled laborers to teach the savages how to till their fields, to

provide them with comfortable homes, clothing, and food. But the Indians preferred their wigwams, skins, raw flesh, and filth. Only as Christian influences taught the Indian his inner need, and how this was to be supplied, was he led to wish and work for the improvement of his outward condition and habits. Civilization does not reproduce itself. It must first be kindled, and it can then be kept alive only by a power genuinely Christian." So Wallace, in Nature, Sept. 7, 1876, vol. 14: 408-412.

(b) Later investigations have rendered it probable that the stone age of some localities was contemporaneous with the bronze and iron ages of others, while certain tribes and nations, instead of making progress from one to the other, were never, so far back as we can trace them, without the knowledge and use of the metals. It is to be observed, moreover, that even without such knowledge and use man is not necessarily a barbarian, though he may be a child.

On the question whether the arts of civilization can be lost, see Arthur Mitchell, Past and Present, 201: Rude art is often the debasement of a higher, instead of being the earlier; the rudest art in a nation may coëxist with the highest; cave-life may accompany high civilization. Illustrations from modern Scotland, where burial of a cock for epilepsy, and sacrifice of a bull, were until very recently extant. Certain arts have unquestionably been lost, as glass-making and iron-working in Assyria (see Mivart, referred to above). The most ancient men do not appear to have been inferior to the latest, either physically or intellectually. Rawlinson: "The explorers who have dug deep into the Mesopotamian mounds, and have ransacked the tombs of Egypt, have come upon no certain traces of savage man in those regions which a wide-spread tradition makes the cradle of the human race. The Tyrolese peasants show that a rude people may be moral, and a very simple people may be highly intelligent. See Southall, Recent Origin of Man, 386-449; Schliemann, Troy and her Remains, 274.

(c) The barbarous customs to which this view looks for support may better be explained as marks of broken-down civilization than as relics of a primitive and universal savagery. Even if they indicated a former state of barbarism, that state might have been itself preceded by a condition of comparative culture.

Mark Hopkins, in Princeton Rev., Sept., 1882: 194-"There is no cruel treatment of females among animals. If man came from the lower animals, then he cannot have been originally savage; for you find the most of this cruel treatment among savages." Tylor instances "street Arabs." He compares street Arabs to a ruined house, but savage tribes to a builder's yard. See Duke of Argyll, Primeval Man, 129, 133; Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 223; McLennan, Studies in Ancient History.

(d) The well-nigh universal tradition of a golden age of virtue and happiness may be most easily explained upon the Scripture view of an actual creation of the race in holiness and its subsequent apostasy.

For references in classic writers to a golden age, see Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 115.

2nd. That the religious history of mankind warrants us in inferring a necessary and universal law of progress, in accordance with which man passes from fetichism to polytheism and monotheism,- this first theological stage, of which fetichism, polytheism, and monotheism are parts, being succeeded by the metaphysical stage, and that in turn by the positive.

This theory is propounded by Comte, in his Positive Philosophy, English transl., 25, 26, 515-636.

This assumed law of progress, however, is contradicted by the following facts:

(a) Not only did the monotheism of the Hebrews precede the great

polytheistic systems of antiquity, but even these heathen religions are purer from polytheistic elements, the further back we trace them; so that the facts point to an original monotheistic basis for them all.

On the evidences of an original monotheism, see Max Müller, Chips, 1: 337; Rawlinson, in Present Day Tracts, 2: no. 11; Legge, Religions of China, 8, 11; Diestel, in Jahrbuch für deutsche Theologie, 1860, and vol. 5: 669; Philip Smith, Anc. Hist. of East, 65, 195; Warren, on the Earliest Creed of Mankind, in the Meth. Quar. Rev., Jan., 1884. (b) "There is no proof that the Indo-Germanic or Semitic stocks ever practiced fetich worship, or were ever enslaved by the lowest types of mythological religion, or ascended from them to somewhat higher" (Fisher).

See Fisher, Essays on Supernat. Origin of Christianity, 545; Bartlett, Sources of History in the Pentateuch, 36-115.

(c) Some of the earliest remains of man yet found show, by the burial of food and weapons with the dead, that there already existed the idea of spiritual beings and of a future state, and therefore a religion of a higher sort than fetichism.

Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object, though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however, identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. See Lyell, Antiquity of Man, quoted in Dawson, Story of Earth and Man, 384; see also 368, 372, 386-"Man's capacities for degradation are commensurate with his capacities for improvement" (Dawson). Lyell, in his last edition, however, admits the evidence from the Aurignac cave to be doubtful. See art. by Dawkins, in Nature, 4: 208.

(d) The theory in question, in making theological thought a merely transient stage of mental evolution, ignores the fact that religion has its root in the intuitions and yearnings of the human soul, and that therefore no philosophical or scientific progress can ever abolish it. While the terms theological, metaphysical, and positive may properly mark the order in which the ideas of the individual and the race are acquired, positivism errs in holding that these three phases of thought are mutually exclusive, and that upon the rise of the later the earlier must of necessity become extinct. John Stuart Mill suggests that "personifying" would be a much better term than "theological" to designate the earliest efforts to explain physical phenomena. On the fundamental principles of Positivism, see New Englander, 1873: 323-386; Diman, Theistic Argument, 338-"Three coëxistent states are here confounded with three successive stages of human thought; three aspects of things with three epochs of time. Theology, metaphysics, and science must always exist side by side, for all positive science rests on metaphysical principles, and theology lies behind both. All are as permanent as human reason itself." Martineau, Types, 1: 487-"Comte sets up mediæval Christianity as the typical example of evolved monotheism, and develops it out of the Greek and Roman polytheism which it overthrew and dissipated. But the religion of modern Europe notoriously does not descend from the same source as its civilization and is no continuation of the ancient culture,"— it comes rather from Hebrew sources; Essays, Philos. and Theol., 1: 24, 62-"The Jews were always a disobliging people: what business had they to be up so early in the morning, disturbing the house ever so long before M. Comte's bell rang to prayers?" See also Gillett, God in Human Thought, 1:17-23; Rawlinson, in Journ. Christ. Philos., April, 1883: 353; Nineteenth Century, Oct., 1886: 473-490.

CHAPTER III.

SIN, OR MAN'S STATE OF APOSTASY.

SECTION I.-THE LAW OF GOD.

As preliminary to a treatment of man's state of apostasy, it becomes necessary to consider the nature of that law of God, the transgression of which is sin. We may best approach the subject by inquiring what is the true conception of

I. LAW IN GENERAL.

The essential idea of law is that of a general expression of will enforced by power. It implies: (a) A lawgiver, or authoritative will. (b) Subjects, or beings upon whom this will terminates. (c) A general command, or expression of this will. (d) A power, enforcing the command.

These elements are found even in what we call natural law. The phrase 'law of nature' involves a self-contradiction, when used to denote a mode of action or an order of sequence behind which there is conceived to be no intelligent and ordaining will. Physics derives the term 'law' from jurisprudence, instead of jurisprudence deriving it from physics. It is first used of the relations of voluntary agents. Causation in our own wills enables us to see something besides mere antecedence and consequence in the world about us. Physical science, in her very use of the word 'law,' implicitly confesses that a supreme Will has set general rules which control the processes of the universe.

Wayland, Moral Science, 1, unwisely defines law as "a mode of existence or order of sequence," thus leaving out of his definition all reference to an ordaining will. He subsequently says that law presupposes an establisher, but in his definition there is nothing to indicate this. We insist, on the other hand, that the term 'law' itself includes the idea of force and cause. The word 'law' is from 'lay' (German legen),== something laid down; German Gesetz, from setzen,= something set or established; Greek vóμos, from véμw,= something assigned or apportioned; Latin lex, from lego,= something said or spoken.

All these derivations show that man's original conception of law is that of something proceeding from volition. Lewes, in his Problems of Life and Mind, says that the term 'law' is so suggestive of a giver and impresser of law, that it ought to be dropped, and the word 'method' substituted. The merit of Austin's treatment of the subject is that he "rigorously limits the term 'law' to the commands of a superior"; see John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1: 88-93, 220-223. The defects of his treatment we shall note further on.

J. S. Mill: "It is the custom, wherever they [ scientific men] can trace regularity of any kind, to call the general proposition which expresses the nature of that regularity, a law; as when in mathematics we speak of the law of the successive terms of a converging series. But the expression law of nature' is generally employed by scientific men with a sort of tacit reference to the original sense of the word 'law,' namely, the 18

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