IV. The lamentable consequence of this great defection, has been an exchange of innocency for guilt, and a paradise for a wilderness. But, which is yet worse, in this state Adam and Eve had got another god than the only true and living God: and he that enticed them to all this mischief, furnished them with a vain knowledge, and pernicious wisdom: the skill of lies and equivocations, shifts, evasions, and excuses. They had lost their plainness and sincerity, and from an upright heart, the image in which God had made man, he became a crooked, twining, twisting serpent; the image of that unrighteous spirit, to whose temptations he yielded up, with his obedience, his paradisaical happiness. V. So that fallen Adam's knowledge of God stood no more in a daily experience of the love and work of God in his soul, but in a notion of what he once did know and experience: which being not the true and living wisdom that is from above, but a mere picture, it cannot preserve man in purity; but puffs up, makes people proud, high-minded, and impatient of contradiction. This was the state of the apostate Jews before Christ came; and has been the condition of apostate Christians ever since he came: their religion standing, some bodily performances excepted, either in what they once knew of the work of God in themselves, and which they have revolted from; or in an historical belief, and an imaginary conception and paraphrase upon the experiences and prophecies of such holy men and women of God, as in all ages have deserved the style and character of his true children. VI. As such a knowledge of God cannot be true, so by experience we find, that it ever brings forth the quite contrary fruits to the true wisdom. For as this "is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be entreated;" (James, iii. 17;) so the knowledge of degenerated and unmortified men is first impure: for it came by the commission of evil, and is held in an evil and impure conscience in them that disobey God's laws, and that daily do those things which they ought not to do; and for which they stand condemned before God's judgment-seat in the souls of men: the light of whose presence searches the most hidden things of darkness, the most secret thoughts, and concealed inclinations of ungodly men. This is the science, falsely so called: and as it is impure, so it is unpeaceable, cross, and hard to be entreated; froward, perverse, and persecuting; jealous that any should be better than they, and hating and abusing those that are.