of the divine mercy, in virtue of which his fathership is the prelude to a higher fathership, the first man is the pattern of the Second, and the royalty of his creation but a rehearsal at the beginning of the world of the reparation which is to crown its end.
The whole work of creation as above described, depends in its result upon the exercise of man’s free-will. His value, before God, lies simply in the way in which he exerts this great prerogative of his reasonable nature. Without it he would be reduced from one who chooses his course, and in that choice becomes good or evil, to the condition of a machine devoid of any moral being. To test this free-will man was given a commandment. We know that he failed under the trial; that he broke the commandment. His disobedience to his Creator was punished by the disobedience of his own compound nature to himself. That divine grace, which we term the state of original justice, and in virtue of which his soul, with its understanding and will, illuminated and fortified, was subject to God, and the body with all its appetites was subject to the soul, was withdrawn. He became subject to death, the certain death of the body, with all that train of diseases and pains which precede it; and the final separation of the soul from its Creator, unless by the way which God indicated to him he should be restored. Becoming a sinner, his refuge was penitence; henceforth his life was to be the life of a penitent; he had lost the grace which was bestowed royally on the innocent; he was left the grace which was to support and lead on the penitent. From the garden of pleasure he is expelled, to go forth into a world which produces thorns and thistles, unless he water it with the sweat of his brow. To all this I only allude, since my proper subject is to trace the first formation of human society as it came forth from the fall. But the primal state of man could not be passed over, because the state in which he grew up, and the state in which he now stands, cannot be understood nor estimated rightly without a due conception of that original condition.
With the loss of original justice Adam does not lose the headship of his race. All men that are to be born remain his children, and continue to be not a species of similar individuals, but a family, a race. All the dealings of God with them continue to be dealings with them as a race. Adam’s fathership, had he not fallen, would have been to them the source of an inestimable good, would have secured to them the transmission of original justice, crowned as it further was by a wholly gratuitous gift, the gift of adoption to a divine sonship. But that fathership, in consequence of his sin, actually transmitted to them a nature penally deprived both of the original endowment and of the superadded adoption; and, as a fact, all the difficulties which occur to the mind in the divine government of the world spring out of this treatment by God of man as a family, a race. But likewise through this continuing fathership of Adam, the Fathership of Christ appears as the completion of an original plan, devised before the foundation of the world, and actually carried out at the appointed time. He was to be son of David and son of Abraham in order that He might be Son of man. This original plan of God is not frustrated but executed by the fall of Adam. The yet undisclosed secrets of human lot have their origin in Adam and their solution in Christ. We are allowed to see that they belong to one plan. No doubt the hidden things of God in this dispensation baffle our scrutiny: they remain for the trial of faith until faith passes into sight, but we are allowed to see the fact of a vast compensation; and over against the fathership which brought death and corruption and the interminable ills of human life, we see all the supernatural blessings of the new covenant, consisting in the triple dowry of adoption, betrothal, and consecration, come to man as a spiritual race descending from the Second Adam.
Thus, not only the primary but the actual state of man in society springs out of an absolute unity. We have here to note two great truths. Adam, as he was expelled from paradise to till the earth and subdue it, was the head of his race in two particulars: first, as to natural society, whence springs civil government; and secondly, as to the worship of God, and the promises included in that worship, whence springs priesthood and all the fabric of religion. The two unities, the social and the religious, had in him their common root; and man thus comes before us in history as a family in which the first father stands at the head of the civil and religious order in most intimate intercourse with God. The only description which we possess of that first period of human society from the Fall to the Deluge, suggests to us a state which seems absolutely walled round by God with securities, both as concerns human life in the intercourse between man and man, and as concerns the purity of their worship of God. As to the first, have we not said all which can be said when we say that they were a family? The king of the human race was the father of every one in it. Certainly if any king could ever command the love and respect of his subjects it must have been Adam in that royalty.
But let us very briefly consider the bearing of man’s condition before the fall, as set forth to us in the sacred records which have been so far followed, upon his knowledge of divine and human things, and his moral state in his first society after the fall.
We have seen Adam in possession of a great dignity, created in the maturity of reason, exercising the full power of thought and speech as directed to truth by an inward gift, which conveys to him the knowledge of the creatures surrounding him; moreover, taught by God as to his present duties and future hopes. We have seen a wife bestowed upon him, who is, as it were, created for him and drawn from him, and a vast family promised to him. He is thus made father and head of his family and his race, and his Creator is his immediate Teacher. After his fall these privileges do not become to him as if they had never been. The memory of them all is complete in him, but a very large portion of their substance remains. Let us take three points, which are enough for our purpose. He receives, at the fall itself, firstly, a great promise of God; secondly, he becomes the Teacher and, thirdly, the Priest of his race. As to the promise, God declares to him that, as the result of the serpent seducing the woman to sin, He will create enmity between the serpent and the woman, the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman; the seed of the woman should crush the serpent’s head; the serpent should lie in wait for his heel. All human history is gathered up in that division of the race, between the seed of the woman, from which springs the City of God, and the seed of the serpent, from which springs the City of the Devil. That is a communication of fresh knowledge to Adam, knowledge of good and evil, a mixture of consolation and sorrow. That is a disclosure of the issue of things stretching to the very end of the world, which comes to sustain Adam in his penitence, to complete the knowledge which he previously had of God and of himself.
In this first great prophecy, which embraces all the religion, the hope, and the destiny of man, the consequences of which are not yet worked out, man is treated as a race. The punishment falls on him as a Father; the Woman through whom it comes, the Mother of his children, points to another Woman and Mother, through whom it is to be reversed, and the Deliverer is to come to him as a Descendant.
Adam, then, was cast out of paradise, but not without hope, still less without knowledge, for he carried with him the knowledge which God had given to him, and the lesson of a great experience. Thus he became the great Teacher of his family. Through him from whom they received natural being and nurture, they received the knowledge of God, of their own end, of all which it behoved them to know for the purpose of their actual life. The great Father was likewise the great Penitent; and the first preacher of God’s justice to men told them likewise of His mercy: a preacher powerful and unequalled in both his themes.
But, by the fall, Adam became likewise the Priest in his family. We learn from the narrative of Cain and Abel that the worship of God by sacrifice had been instituted, and it is not obscurely intimated that it was instituted even before he was cast out of paradise, since God Himself clothed Adam and Eve with skins of beasts, which, doubtless, were slain in sacrifice, since they were not used for food.7
The rite of bloody sacrifice, utterly unintelligible without the notion of sin, and inconceivable without a positive divine institution, so precise in its formularies about the statement of sin, and the need of expiation, is an everliving prophecy of the great sacrifice which God had intended “before the foundation of the world,” and a token of the knowledge which He had communicated to Adam before he became a father. Unfallen man needed to make no sacrifice, but only the triple offering of adoration, thanksgiving, and prayer. These Adam would have given before
St. Aug. cont. Faustum, 22, 17. Antiqua enim res est prænuntiativa immolatio sanguinis, futuram passionem Mediatoris ab initio generis humani testificans; hanc enim primus Abel obtulisse in sacris litteris invenitur.
