ed that the
fruit of the forbidden tree was a poison: but we cannot enter into this
detail. It suffices that God forbade a harmful thing; one must not
therefore suppose that God acted here simply in the character of a
legislator who enacts a purely positive law, or of a judge who imposes and
inflicts a punishment by an order of his will, without any connexion
between the evil of guilt and the evil of punishment. And it is not
necessary to suppose that God in justifiable annoyance deliberately put a
corruption in the soul and the body of man, by an extraordinary action, in
order to punish him: much as the Athenians gave hemlock-juice to their
criminals. M. Bayle takes the matter thus: he speaks as if the original
corruption had been put in the soul of the first man by an order and
operation of God. It is that which calls forth his objection (_Reply to the
Questions of a Provincial_, vol. III, ch. 178, p. 1218) 'that reason would
not commend the monarch who, in order to chastise a rebel, condemned him
and his descendants to have a tendency towards rebellion'. But this
chastisement happens naturally to the wicked, without any ordinance of a
legislator, and they become addicted to evil. If drunkards begot children
inclined to the same vice, by a natural consequence of what takes place in
bodies, that would be a punishment of their progenitors, but it would [185]
not be a penalty of law. There is something comparable to this in the
consequences of the first man's sin. For the contemplation of divine wisdom
leads us to believe that the realm of nature serves that of grace; and that
God as an Architect has done all in a manner befitting God considered as a
Monarch. We do not sufficiently know the nature of the forbidden fruit, or
that of the action, or its effects, to judge of the details of this matter:
nevertheless we must do God justice so far as to believe that it comprised
something other than what painters depict for us.

113. V. 'It has pleased him by his infinite mercy to deliver a very few men
from this condemnation; and, leaving them exposed during this life to the
corruption of sin and misery, he has given them aids which enable them to
obtain the never-ending bliss of paradise.' Many in the past have doubted,
as I have already observed, whether the number of the damned is so great as
is generally supposed; and it appears that they believed in the existence
of some intermediate state between eternal damnation and perf