ure of man? Does human reason admit such a
possible incongruity? No, indeed. Folly may claim license for its
lusts in the plea of a nature received from a Creator. Haughty pride,
on the other hand, may deny that nature altogether. The clearer,
nobler, truer, philosophy of our writer justifies God, even in view of
all the evil that makes him groan, and he says, "Lo, this only have I
found, that God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many
inventions."

Interesting as well as beautiful it is to hear this conclusion of man's
reason, not at all in view of the exceeding riches of God's grace, but
simply looking at _facts_, in the light that Nature gives. Man neither
is, nor can be, an exception to the rule. God has made him upright.
If not so now, it is because he has departed from this state, and his
many inventions, or _arts_ (as Luther translates the word
significantly), his devices, his search after new things (but the word
"inventions" expresses the thought of the original correctly), are so
many proofs of dissatisfaction and unrest.

He may, in that pride, which turns everything to its own glory, point
to these very inventions as evidences of his progress; and in a certain
way they do unquestionably speak his intelligence and immense
superiority over the lower creation. Yet the very invention bespeaks
need; for most truthful is the proverb, "Necessity is the mother of
invention"; and surely in the way of Nature _necessity_ is not a glory,
but a shame. Let him glory in his inventions, then; and his glory is
in his shame. Adam in his Eden of delights, upright, content, thought
never of invention. He took from God's hand what God gave, with no
need to make calls upon his own ingenuity to supply his longings. The
fall introduces the inventive faculty, and human ingenuity begins to
work to overcome the need, of which now, for the first time, man
becomes aware; but we hear no singing in connection with that first
invention of the apron of fig-leaves. That faculty has marked his path
throughout the centuries. Not always at one level, or ever moving in
one direction,--it has risen and fallen, with flow and ebb, as the
tides; now surging upward with skillful "artifice in brass and iron,"
and to the music of "harp and organ," until it aims at heaven itself,
and the Lord again and again interposes and abases by flood and
scattering,--now ebbing, till apparently extinct in the low-sunken
tribes of earth