pe
to escape, from a knowledge which is everlasting in his creator?

God never said that man would become better by learning to distinguish evil
from good,--but the contrary, that by this knowledge, by man's first
disobedience, came "death into the world, and all our woe."

"Shall mortal man be more just than God?" asks the poet-patriarch. May men
rid themselves of an incubus which God never can throw off? Do mortals know
more than God, that they may declare Him absolutely cognizant of sin?

God created all things, and pronounced them good. Was evil among these good
things? Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so must man, or
the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.

If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction
comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature is
punished for his likeness to his creator.

God is commonly called the _sinless_, and man the _sinful_; but if the
thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless?
Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and
human sin become only an echo of the divine?

Such vagaries are to be found in heathen religious history. There are, or
have been, devotees who worship not the good Deity, who will not harm them,
but the bad deity, who seeks to do them mischief, and whom therefore they
wish to bribe with prayers into quiescence, as a criminal appeases, with a
money-bag, the venal officer.

Surely this is no Christian worship! In Christianity man bows to the
infinite perfection which he is bidden to imitate. In Truth, such
terms as _divine sin_ and _infinite sinner_ are unheard-of
contradictions,--absurdities; but _would_ they be sheer nonsense, if God
has, or can have, a real knowledge of sin?

Ways Higher than Our Ways

A lie has only one chance of successful deception,--to be accounted true.
Evil seeks to fasten all error upon God, and so make the lie seem part of
eternal Truth.

Emerson says, "Hitch your wagon to a star." I say, Be allied to the deific
power, and all that is good will aid your journey, as the stars in their
courses fought against Sisera. (Judges v. 20.) Hourly, in Christian
Science, man thus weds himself with God, or rather he ratifies a union
predestined from all eternity; but evil ties its wagon-load of offal to the
divine chariots,--or seeks so to do,--that its vileness may be christened
purity, and its darkness get consolat