history and destiny only, but the destiny of a
great nation; Adam changed, by his one sin, the destiny of a great
world. "_Wherefore_," says the apostle, "_as by one man sin entered into
the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men_." (Rom.
v. 12.) Adam, like Esau, saw through the eyes of Eve that the "_tree was
good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be
desired to make one wise_." What good shall my birth-right do to me, he
said practically when he saw the forbidden fruit, and he sold it; and
that moment's work for him, for you, for me, for all the myriad human
generations, can never be recalled in time or in eternity. There is
something very much nobler here than in Esau's profaneness. It was not
in a moment of sensual lust that our first father sold his own
birthright and ours. The desire of wisdom, or what he took for wisdom,
had much to do with the force of the temptation; but the essence of the
matter is the same: Adam and Esau both chose, in the place of the good
which God had provided for them, a good which they provided for
themselves. Bitterly Adam, like Esau, repented of his folly, and sought
to undo his work. When the wilderness lay cold and bare before him, and
the flaming sword of the cherubim guarded the backward path to the
bright abodes which he had lost for ever, he measured for the first time
the full significance of his transgression. And when the sun set angry
and lurid on the wilderness, and the moaning winds swept hoarsely over
the waste, while a shudder shook the breast of nature as the tempest
clouds gathered in the sullen sky, Adam caught the infection of the
tremor, and watched with quivering eye the awful conflict of the forces
which had broken loose from his allegiance, and which seemed to come
thundering on as the doomsmen of the death which his Judge had decreed.
Think you that then his heart did not cling to the memories of the
splendours and serenities of Eden with passionate longing; think you
that he did not prostrate himself in an agony of frenzied supplication
that the barred portal might be unclosed again, that the fiery sword
might be sheathed, that the flowers of Eden might again spring beneath
his footsteps, while the balmy breezes whispered a blessing as they
played around the field of his labour and his bower of rest?

And what has been the long and bitter cry of man's sad history? O God,
reverse the sentence, reopen the gate of paradi