2. In Fear. — In no way does the tragedy of Eden come out with more picturesque realism than in these hiding figures fleeing from the face of the God against whom they have sinned. But yesterday the presence of God was their chief delight. It made the flowers more beautiful ; it added to the fragrance of the blossoming trees ; it gave more exquisite harmony to the singing
* Dora Greenwell. ' R. J. Campbell.
78 FELLOWSHIP
of the birds ; it was the perfection of their delight and their joy. Fear was not in all their thoughts, and they gazed rapturously into the countenance of their Heavenly Father as a child gazes with unspeakable confidence and trust into the eyes of its mother. But now there is nothing they dread so much as the face of God. And we watch them as they hasten into the thickest part of the garden and vainly try to hide themselves from the eye of their Creator.
^ A child knows at once what it is to love God ; but you must force its understanding into an unnatural course to teach it that God is a Person to be afraid of. That terror of God, which cannot spring out of holiness and innocence, comes of itself, however, without teaching or forcing, with sin.^
^ One of the first results of sin is to awaken the conscience and make it an accuser and pursuer. All great literature abounds in illustrations of this theme. No man deals with it with more wisdom and fidelity than Shakespeare. We have all had on our lips at one time or other those words of Hamlet in which he declares that "Conscience does make cowards of us all." And in the tragedy of " King Eichard ill." Shakespeare makes a wicked man say of his conscience, " I'll not meddle with it : it is a dangerous thing : it makes a man a coward : a man cannot steal, but it accuseth him ; he cannot swear, but it checks him " (Act i. scene iv.).
^ Spurgeon tells of an Englishman who was so constantly in debt and so frequently arrested by the bailiffs that on one occasion, when going by a fence, the sleeve of his coat catching on a nail, he turned round and said, obeying the instinctive fear of his heart, " I don't owe you anything, sir." He thought the picket was a bailiff.2
3. In Excuses. — All our worst sins are marked by a certain recklessness of consequences. " Never mind what may come of it all," we say to ourselves, " let us brave the worst." And when the consequences do come — as come they must, sooner or later — we throw the blame on things or persons other than ourselves. Someone's subtlety beguiled us into thinking that rebellion against the moral order would be a glorious gain. Or else we cry out against society or our inherited temperament as responsible for our misdoings. We complain dolefully of the demoralizing tendencies of modern life. It is no fault of ours, we say, if we,
> J. H. Blunt. » L. A. Banks.
GENESIS III. 8. 9 79
too, drift with the stream, and reach out our hands to secure the delights of the passing hour. So, in our blindness and infatuation, we excuse ourselves. And our eyes are opened when we learn in sorrow and suffering that one sinful act may spread its con- taminating fibres through the whole of our life.
1J The literature of imagination — much of the fiction of our time and some of its poetry — is skilful in painting the wicked thing, until it appears gay and brilliant and free. There are philosophies and theologies which apologize for it, and teach us to view it almost as a necessity for our fuller life, or as a halting- place in the march of the soul to what is higher and holier. Society has a hundred affectations and excuses that hide its foulness, as Greek assassins concealed their death-bringing daggers under the greenery of myrtle leaves. It is a faU upward, we are told, and not a fall downward. On the Amazon a famous naturalist discovered a spider which spread itself out as a flower ; but the insects lighting on it found destruction instead of sweet- ness and honey. Our sin is our sin, evil, poisonous, fatal, although it transmutes itself into an angel of goodness.^
4. By Hiding. — " The man and his wife hid themselves." Is not this hiding among the trees of the garden a symbolical represen- tation of what sinners have been doing ever since ? — have they not all been endeavouring to escape from God, and to lead a separated and independent life ? They have been fleeing from the Divine presence, and hiding themselves amid any trees that would keep that presence far enough away.
^ Professor Phelps tells of a burglar who rifled an unoccupied dwelling by the seaside. He ransacked the rooms, and heaped his plunder in the parlour. There were evidences that here he sat down to rest. On a bracket in the corner stood a marble bust of Guide's Ecce Homo — Christ crowned with thorns. The guilty man had taken it in his hands and examined it — it bore the marks of his fingers — but he replaced it with its face turned to the wall, as if he would not have even the sightless eyes of the marble Saviour look upon his deeds of infamy .^