Expositions of Holy Scripture | Page 6

die. A fall, and a
rise--a rise that reverses the fall, a rise that transcends the glory from
which he fell,--that is the Bible's notion of the history of the world, and
I, for my part, believe it to be true, and feel it to be the one satisfactory
explanation of what I see round about me and am conscious of within
me.
1. _Man had an Eden and lost it._
I take the Fall to be a historical fact. To all who accept the authority of
Scripture, no words are needed beyond the simple statement before us,
but we may just gather up the signs that there are on the wide field of
the world's history, and in the narrower experience of individuals, that
such a fall has been.
Look at the condition of the world: its degradation, its savagery-all its
pining myriads, all its untold millions who sit in darkness and the
shadow of death. Will any man try to bring before him the actual state

of the heathen world, and, retaining his belief in a God, profess that
these men are what God meant men to be? It seems to me that the
present condition of the world is not congruous with the idea that men
are in their primitive state, and if this is what God meant men for, then
I see not how the dark clouds which rest on His wisdom and His love
are to be lifted off.
Then, again--if the world has not a Fall in its history, then we must take
the lowest condition as the one from which all have come; and is that
idea capable of defence? Do we see anywhere signs of an upward
process going on now? Have we any experience of a tribe raising itself?
Can you catch anywhere a race in the act of struggling up, outside of
the pale of Christianity? Is not the history of all a history of decadence,
except only where the Gospel has come in to reverse the process?
But passing from this: What mean the experiences of the
individual-these longings; this hard toil; these sorrows?
How comes it that man alone on earth, manifestly meant to be leader,
lord, etc., seems but cursed with a higher nature that he may know
greater sorrows, and raised above the beasts in capacity that he may
sink below them in woe, this capacity only leading to a more exquisite
susceptibility, to a more various as well as more poignant misery?
Whence come the contrarieties and discordance in his nature?
It seems to me that all this is best explained as the Bible explains it by
saying: (1) Sin has done it; (2) Sin is not part of God's original design,
but man has fallen; (3) Sin had a personal beginning. There have been
men who were pure, able to stand but free to fall.
It seems to me that that explanation is more in harmony with the facts
of the case, finds more response in the unsophisticated instinct of man,
than any other. It seems to me that, though it leaves many dark and
sorrowful mysteries all unsolved, yet that it alleviates the blackest of
them, and flings some rays of hope on them all. It seems to me that it
relieves the character and administration of God from the darkest
dishonour; that it delivers man's position and destiny from the most
hopeless despair; that though it leaves the mystery of the origin of evil,
it brings out into clearest relief the central truths that evil is evil, and
sin and sorrow are not God's will; that it vindicates as something better
than fond imaginings the vague aspirations of the soul for a fair and
holy state; that it establishes, as nothing else will, at once the love of

God and the dignity of man; that it leaves open the possibility of the
final overthrow of that Sin which it treats as an intrusion and
stigmatises as a fall; that it therefore braces for more vigorous, hopeful
conflict against it, and that while but for it the answer to the despairing
question, Hast Thou made all men in vain? must be either the wailing
echo 'In vain,' or the denial that He has made them at all, there is hope
and there is power, and there is brightness thrown on the character of
God and on the fate of man, by the old belief that God made man
upright, and that man made himself a sinner.
2. Heaven restores the lost Eden.
'God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared them a
city.'
The highest conception we can form of heaven is the reversal of all the
evil of earth, and the completion of its incomplete good: the sinless
purity--the