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.