So before this discovery of her sin, while it was inwardly preparing for the act, the eyes of Eve were not opened. Had they been she must have died before she could have touched the fruit; but because her eyes were not yet opened, and because her unbelief yet remained, there remained also the longing for the fruit prohibited, and there remained also the purpose and the desire to obtain the Satan-promised knowledge, which was also forbidden. Poor miserable Eve, she is so wrapped up in disbelief, both in soul and in body, that she sees not the mighty evil she is committing! Similar examples of the insensible security and unconcern of sin are furnished by our ecclesiastical histories. Arius securely blesses himself, as long as he can find means of eluding the Scripture testimonies concerning the Divinity of the Son. But this security lasts not very long. As soon as the eyes of Eve were opened, she remembered the law of her God spoken to her, which before she had forgotten, "that she and Adam should not eat of the forbidden tree." Before she had this knowledge of God's law she was "without sin," as Paul expresses it, Rom. 7:9, "And I was alive apart from the law once." Not because the law really did not exist, but because the apostle did not feel the threatenings and punishments of it; and hence he seemed to himself to be "without the law." "For through the law cometh the knowledge of sin," Rom. 3:20. When therefore the law revived in his knowledge of it, his sin revived also with that knowledge, Rom. 7:9. All this Moses would indicate in his history of our first parents, when he says, "And the eyes of them both were opened," as if he had said, Satan had closed, not the eyes only of Eve, but her heart also by unbelief and by the disobedience of all the members of her body and of her soul without and within. But after her sin was committed and "finished," he willingly suffers the eyes of them both to be opened, that they might see what they had done. For this is Satan's manner of cutting short the ruin of those who sin under his temptations; when they have sinned, he leaves them to perish in despair.