ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.' After this jiroparation came the thought that the tree -was good for food, pleasant to look upon, and to be desired to make one wise. The sensual desire would now naturally start up, and the woman seduced became the seducer. The powers of the soul were corrupted be- fore the actual sin took place ; the faculty of knowl- edge 1)3' doubt and unbelief toward God, the faculty of desire through unbounded striving and proud excess, as the Grecian fable of Prometheus represents it; and, finally, the faculty of feeling, through sensual longing, which propensity the religion of the Greeks sets forth by Epinietheus and Pandora. Thus did the possibil- ity of the fall, which rests upon the freedom of the creature, p.iss over into reality under evil outward in- fluences. The conversation between Eve and the ser- pent shows how accessible she was ; the woman, as the weaker part, is first approichcd and misled, and not till then the man, and even then only through her ; as also the apostle Paul expresses it (1 Tim. ii, 14), the woman was first in the transgression. Eothe, indeed (p. 221), thinks that the assumption of a satan- ical temptation does not at all help the difficult}', be- cause that assumption always presupposes a real sus- ceptibility of being tempted, a sinful predisposition, a minimum of sin. But the possibility of being tempted to sin is not yet sin ; with Kothe that predisposition is rather something already existing. It is certainh' much more worthy of God to conceive of his creatures as pure and good — they first detcruiining themselves to evil, and the enemy active therein. If even the Son of God could be tempted without injury to his sin- lessness, much more the first Adam, whose personality and divine resemblance were specifically lower. If, in fine, we compare the scriptural theory, thus under- stood, with the modern philosopliical explanations of the fall, the result will be that the former will be found to cont lin incomparably more truth and wisdom than the latter ; although Kothe (p. 221) is of the opinion that the Biblical account of the fall can no longer be maintained, and that the fall cannot be explained from the Mosaic stand-point. Only the Bible (and perhaps, agreeing with it, the mythology of antiquity) tells us of a man created in the image of God, in a paradisiacal state of innocence ; and, in accordance with this fact, shows how this state was interrupted and perverted into one of guilt. Dr. Julius jMiiller, on the contrary, althi)ugh Paradise has still a place in his sj'stem, places Adam in it as already a sinner. In the same way Iiothe presupposes what he ought to show, since he assumes evil as original and necessarj' in the devel- opment of the world. We cannot see. either accord- ing to Jluller 01 Kothe, whence it could properly come into the natural world. Kothe, with his presupposi- tion, is obliged to assume one of two things : either he must dualisticallj- establish an evil principle in matter^ and deny tlie pure creation of God, or he must ascribe the origin of sin, not to the perverted will, but to God himself: in both cases he has a Manichtcan life-view of sentient beings. Sin with him is not a free act of man, proceeding out of the heart and will ; it springs from the overmatching power of material nature sub- duing liis personality with inevitable necessitj' (p. 226). 'The origin of evil from pure good must for- ever remain inconceivaljle' (p. 222) ; thus he estab- lishes an impure material creation. Is anj'thing ex- plained liy this means ? AVhence comes, then, im- purity into the material creation before all acts of the will ? Is not the question more easily explained by the abuse of freedom than bj- metaplij'sjcs ; more easi- ly through the devil and man than bj' the act of the Creator? The fall, according to the doctrine of the Church, sa}-s Kothe (p. 220), was a. blunder in the work of the earthly creation, as it were, at the begin- ning. In order to avoid tliis, either an evil principle must have been co-operative in the creation, or else God himself must have ruined his own work at its
commencement. Shall we call this escaping the blun- der made at the beginning ? Is it not rather increas- ing it, and carrying it over into the region of the per- fect and the holy ? The latter of these two opinions, strictly taken, is that of Kothe, since he assumes mat- ter as created by God, and from matter deduces sin. But the positions, Matter was created by God, and Matter is the opposite of God, and hence the origin of sin, contradict each other."
Literature. — Besides the books already cited in this article, see Hagenbach, Uistonj of Doctrines ; Neander, History of Dogmas ; Hhcdd, IIisto?-y (f Christian Doc- friiie (all under Anthropolorjy) ; Ilase, Evcmg.-Protest. Dcginatik, Lips. 18G0, § 71-73 ; Fletcher, Apjieul to Mat- ter of Fact and Common Sense ; Doderlein, Inst. Theol. Christ. § 178 ; Fairbairn, Tiipology of Scripture, i, 240 sq. ; Kichers, Schopfung.-'geschichte (Leips. 1854, 8vo) ; Middleton, Essay on the Creation and Fall of Man, Works (1755, 5 vols.), iii, 437 sq. ; Zeller, Die iilteste Theodicee (Jena, 1803, 8vo); Coleridge, Aids to Re/lec- tion, Intr. GG ; Cunningham, Historical Theologij, vol. i, ch. xix ; Delitzsch, Biblical Psychology (Edinb. 18G7), p. 147 sq. ; Monsell, The Religion ffRedemp>'ion (Lond. 18G7), p. 20 sq. ; Meth. Qnar. Review, Oct. 18G7, art. vii.