“The religion of the World now is that Man is born to die. But from the beginning it was not so, for Man was made to live. God made not Death till Man brought it upon himself by his delinquency. Adam stood as fair for Life as Death, and fairer too, because he was in the actual possession of Life,—as Tenant thereof at the Will of God, and had an opportunity to have made that title perpetual by the Tree of Life, which stood before him with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And here 'tis observable how the same act of man is made the condition both of his life and death: ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and die,’ or ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and live for ever.’ 'Tis not to be conceived that there was any physical virtues in either of these Trees whereby to cause life or death; but God having sanctified them by those two different names, he was obliged to make good his own characters of them, by commanding the whole Creation to act in such a manner as that Man should feel the effects of this word, according to which of the Trees he first put forth his hand. And it is yet more strange, that man having life and death set before him at the same time and place, and both to be had upon the same condition, that he should single out his own death and leave the Tree of Life untouched. And what is further strange, even after his election of death he had an interval of time before his expulsion out of Paradise, to have retrieved his fate by putting forth his hand to the Tree of Life; and yet he omitted this too! “But by all this it is manifest that as the form or person of man in his first creation was capable of eternal life without dying, so the fall of man which happened to him after his creation hath not disabled his person from that capacity of eternal life. And therefore durst Man even then have broken through the Cherubim and flaming sword, or could he now any way come at the Tree of Life, he must yet live for ever, notwithstanding his sin committed in Paradise and his expulsion out of it. But this Tree of Life now seems lost to Man; and so he remains under the curse of that other Tree, ‘in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt die.’ Which sentence of the Law is the cause of the death of Man, and was the commencement of the Custom of Death in the World, and by the force of this Law Death has kept the possession (before admitted) to this day.