CHAPTER VII. THE TRIAL AND SENTENCE. The nature of the THE sin was irrevocably committed: the Tempter had triumphed. But what of the affirmacovering of glory which tion, "Your eyes shall be opened, and our first parents lost. ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil"? Alas! it had indeed proved true; but in a fashion widely differing from Eve's expectation. For in the impetuosity of her pride she had not tarried to reflect that the knowledge of God must needs be fraught with destructive peril to those who have neither the wisdom nor the power of God. Her eyes and those of her husband were indeed opened; but only to see themselves, to behold their own sad condition of nakedness and shame. For now they became suddenly conscious of the vileness of that flesh which had been the medium of their transgression; they were bewildered with the painful sense of a fall from the eminence on which God had placed them, of their resemblance to the brutes around them, nay, even of their unfitness to be seen. And these feelings seem to have been intensified in no small degree by an instant and visible change in their outward appearance. For while they remained in obedience, the spirit which God had breathed into them retained its full power and vigour. Its pervading influence defended their whole being from the inroads of corruption and death; while at the same time its brightness, shining through the covering of flesh, shed a lustrous halo around them; so that the grosser element of their bodies was concealed within a veil of radiant glory.* And thus, as the rulers of creation, they were strikingly distinguished from all the creatures which were placed under them. But their sin was only made possible by a league of soul and body which destroyed the balance of their being. The overborne spirit was reduced to the condition of a powerless and almost silent prisoner; and, consequently, its light faded and disappeared. Its influence was gone: it could no longer either preserve their bodies from decay, or clothe them in its glory as with a garment. The threat of God was an accomplished fact; the reign of death had commenced. Nor is it difficult to prove that the recovery of a visible glory will be the instant result Christ the sons of God of the restoration of spirit soul and the restoration of the body to perfect order and harmony, the sign of our manifestation as the sons of God. But it will then shine with far more intense brilliancy than it did in Adam: for, as we have before seen, the body of unfallen man. was not a spiritual body. The spirit did indeed exercise a mighty and vigorous influence, but the soul was the ruling power, even as it continues to be: for the first man became a living soul.f But when the resurrection, or the change At the coming of will be manifested by lost covering. *Compare the description of God in Psalm civ. -"Who coverest Thyself with light as with a garment." † 1 Cor. xv. 45. |