he slenderest beginnings, lower and lower into folly,
impurity, and all other derelictions from the excellence of God. The
lines, once unparalleled, would, without a check, go further apart for
all eternity; albeit, the primal deviation arose in time. The aerolite,
dropping slowly at first, increases in swiftness as it multiplies the
fathoms of descent: and if the abyss be really bottomless, how
impossible a check or a return.

Some such terrible example would amount to a reasonable likelihood, if
only for a lesson and a warning: to all intelligent hierarchs, be not
high-minded, but fear; to all responsible beings, keep righteousness and
reverence, and tempt not God; to all the Virtues, Dominations,
Obediences, and due Subordinations of unknown glorious worlds, a loud
and living exhortation to exercise, and not to let grow dim their
spiritual energies, in efforts after goodness, wisdom, and purity. A
creature state, to be happy, must be a progressive state: the capability
of progression argues lack, or a tendency from good: and progression
itself needs a spur, lest indolence relapse towards evil.

Additionally: we must remember that a creature's excellence before God
is the reasonable service which he freely renders: freedom, dangerous
prerogative, involves choice: and choice necessitates the possibility of
error. The command to a rational intelligence would be, do this, and
live; do it not, and die: if thou doest, it is well done, good and
faithful servant; thou hast mounted by thine own heaven-blest exertions
to a higher approach towards infinite perfection; enter thou into the
joy, not merely of a creature, but of thy Lord. But, if thou doest not,
it is wo to thee, unworthy hireling; thou hast broken the tie that bound
thee to thy Maker--obedience, the root of happiness; thou livest on
indeed, because the Former of all things cancelleth not nor endeth his
beginning; but henceforth thine existence is, as a river which
earthquakes have divorced from its bed, and instead of flowing on for
ever through the fair pastures of peace and among the mountain roots of
everlasting righteousness, thy downward course is shattery, headlong,
turbulent, and destructive; black-throated whirlpools here, miasmatic
marshes there, a cataract, a shoal, a rapid; until the remorseless
stream, lashing among rocks which its own riot rendered sterile, pours
its unresting waters into the thirsty sands of the Sahara.

It was indeed probable (as