become partakers either in a sin which was never
committed or in a malediction which was never pronounced. Nor can
Original Sin be a true dogma if our first parents did not transmit the
germs of iniquity to their children. If Adam did not fall there was no
need for Christ to save us; if he did not set God and man at variance
there was no need for an atonement; and so the Christian scheme of
salvation would be a _fiasco_ from beginning to end. This will never do.
No Garden of Eden, no Gethsemane! No Fall, no Redemption! No Adam, no
Christ!

Mother Eve's curiosity was the motive of the first transgression of
God's commandments in the history of the world, and the whole human
race was brought under the risk of eternal perdition because of her
partiality to fruit. Millions of souls now writhe in hell because,
six thousand years ago, she took a bite of an apple. What a tender and
beautiful story! God made her to be Adam's helpmeet. She helped him to
a slice of apple, and that soon helped them both outside Eden. The sour
stuff disagreed with him as it did with her. It has disagreed, with all
their posterity. In fact it was endowed with the marvellous power of
transmitting spiritual stomach-ache through any number of generations.

How do we know that it was an _apple_ and not some other fruit? Why, on
the best authority extant after the Holy Scriptures themselves, namely,
our auxiliary Bible, "Paradise Lost;" in the tenth book whereof Satan
makes the following boast to his infernal peers after his exploit in
Eden:--

"Him by fraud I have seduced
From his Creator, and, the more to increase
Your wonder, with an _apple_."

Yet another authority is the profane author of "Don Juan," who, in the
first stanza of the tenth canto, says of Newton:

"And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,
Since Adam, with a fall, or with an _apple_."

Milton, being very pious, was probably in the counsel of God. How else
could he have given us an authentic version of the long colloquies that
were carried on in heaven? Byron, being very profane, was probably in
the counsel of Satan. And thus we have the most unimpeachable testimony
of two opposite sources to the fact that it was an _apple_, and not a
rarer fruit, which overcame the virtue of our first parents, and played
the devil with their big family of children.

This apple grew on the Tree of Knowledge, which God planted in the midst
of the Garden of E