It has often been pointed out as evidence of man's fall that he is the only created thing that does not live up to his possibilities. In plant and bird and beast there is no disobedience--all fulfill the purpose of their creation, from the flower, that puts forth its bloom as perfectly when it "wastes its sweetness on the desert air" as when in the garden its beauty calls forth expressions of delight, to the bird that wakes the echoes of trackless forests with its melody. Man, only man, mocks his Maker by prostituting to evil the powers that might lift him within sight of the throne of God. If so many men and women fall _now_, in spite of light and love and all the incentives to noble living, is it incredible that the first pair should have fallen when the race was young? Possibility becomes probability when we remember that the conflict that rages between the mind and the heart is the one real conflict in every life. Reason versus faith is the great issue to-day as in Eden. Faith says obey; reason asks, Why? The one looks up confidingly to a Power above; the other relies on self and rejects even the authority of Jehovah unless the finite mind can comprehend the plan of the Infinite. No one will doubt the doctrine of original sin if he will study nature and then analyze himself. In the plant, in the animal and in the physical man, the invisible thing which we call life is the only sustaining force; when it takes its flight, that which remains falls back to the earth and becomes dust. And so the spiritual in man is the only force that can give him a moral nature and preserve it from decay; when his spiritual life departs the mind as well as the body rots.