Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

()8 THE FIRST AND THE SECOND MAN.of sonship and the prerogatives attending it withdrawn,but this withdrawal was a punishment,which their absence in the presumed case of anoriginal state of simple nature would not have been.Thus death was a punishment to Adam and hisace ; the body's weakness and disease, the soul'ssorrows and pains, the disobedience of the inferiorappetites to the reason, the resistance of the reasonto the law of God, were all punishments, and a remarkablepoint of the punishment is to be seenin this. Aclam, as the head of his race, was invirtue of natural propagation to have bestowedon the children of his flesh, the members of hisbody, his own supernatural inheritance. Thus asingular honour was conferred on the fathershipof Adam. But now when, in virtue of this naturalpropagation, he, continuing to be the head of hisrace, transmitted to it the guilt of adoption lostinstead of the blessing of adoption -L conferred, apeculiar shame was set by God upon this father-ship of Adam, and upon all the circumstancesattending it: so that henceforth in the disinherited"race the bride veiled her head, and the act ofbeing a father became an act of shame.The condition, therefore, of Adam and his posterityafter his fall differed from the conditionwhich would have been that of simple nature bythe whole extent of the guilt incurred by thenature in its fall from sonship.And herein lies one peculiarity, and one