The verb HISKIL signifies "to be prudent" or "wise." Hence, MASKIL is "wise" or "prudent," as in Psalm 14:2, "Jehovah looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek after God." And again, Is. 53:11, "By the knowledge of himself, JASKIL, shall my righteous servant justify many." The word signifies properly that wisdom by which God is known and acknowledged. And Eve had this light or rather this sun of knowledge in her heart before she fell; because she had the Word. And she had moreover the knowledge of all the creatures. But not content with this wisdom, she wished to mount higher and to know God otherwise than he had revealed himself to her in his Word. This was her fall. She let go the true wisdom, and that being lost, she rushed into utter blindness. Just as Satan acted in the garden of Eden, so he acts now. God commands us to believe the Gospel of his Son, that we may thus be saved. This is true wisdom, as Christ himself also affirms: "This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ," John 17:3. This wisdom the monk utterly disregards, and turns aside to other things. He puts on a cowl, girds himself with a rope and takes upon him the vow of celibacy; and he thinks that by such means he shall please God and be saved. And all this is that sublime wisdom which is exercised in the worship of God, and in a great religious observance toward him; all of which is the implantation of Satan, engrafted on the original sin of our fallen nature; causing men to turn away from the Word of God, which he has himself "set forth" as the way of salvation, and to turn aside to following their own cogitations. Just like Eve. She was created the wisest of all women that ever existed; but she longed for another wisdom contrary to and above the Word; and on account of this newly desired wisdom she fell and sinned, in a multiplicity of forms, with all her senses, with her thoughts, with her sight, with her desire, with her touch, with her taste, with her whole act. They are not to be listened to, therefore, who argue it was cruelty that this nature of ours should be thus miserably corrupted, sunk under death, and involved in all the other calamities to which it is subject for the simple act of tasting a certain fruit. The Epicureans, indeed, when they hear these things, laugh at them as a mere fable. But to a careful reader, who duly ponders these recorded facts, it will at once be manifest that the simple bite of the fruit was not the cause of these awful consequences. Such an one will see that the sin committed was the cause of the whole calamity which followed, even the sin of Eve, which she committed against both tables of the law, against God himself and against his Word. For her sin was of that description that she cast aside the Word of God and gave herself up wholly to Satan, and to his teaching as his disciple.