“By his act of delinquency and the sentence upon it, Adam stood attainted and became a dead man in law, though he was not executed till about nine hundred years afterwards.” Lawyer as Asgill was, and legally as he conducts his whole extraordinary argument, he yet offers a moral extenuation of Adam's offence. Eve after her eating and Adam before his eating, were, he says, in two different states, she in the state of Death, and he in the State of Life; and thereby his was much the harder case. For she by her very creation was so much a part of himself that he could not be happy while she was miserable. The loss of her happiness so much affected him by sympathy that all his other enjoyments could do him no good; and therefore since he thought it impossible for her to return into the same state with him, he chose, rather than be parted from her, to hazard himself in the same state with her. Asgill then resumes his legal view of the case: the offence he says was at last joint and several; the sentence fell upon Mankind as descendants from these our common ancestors, and so upon Christ himself. And this is the reason why in the genealogy of our Saviour as set down by two Evangelists his legal descent by Joseph is only counted upon, “because all legal descents are accounted from the father.” As he was born of a Virgin to preserve his nature from the defilement of humanity, so was he of a Virgin espoused to derive upon himself the curse of the Law by a legal father: for which purpose it was necessary that the birth of Christ should, in the terms of the Evangelist, be on this wise and no otherwise. And hence the Genealogy of Christ is a fundamental part of Eternal Life. The reader will soon perceive that technically as Asgill treated his strange argument, he was sincerely and even religiously convinced of its importance and its truth. “Having shewn,” he proceeds, “how this Law fell upon Christ, it is next incumbent on me to shew that it is taken away by his death, and consequently that the long possession of Death over the World can be no longer a title against Life. But when I say this Law is taken away, I don't mean that the words of it are taken away; for they remain with us to this day and being matter of Record must remain for ever; but that it is satisfied by other matter of Record, by which the force of it is gone. Law satisfied is no Law, as a debt satisfied is no debt. Now the specific demand of the Law was Death; and of a man; and a man made under the Law. Christ qualified himself to be so: and as such suffered under it, thus undergoing the literal sentence. This he might have done and not have given the Law satisfaction, for millions of men before him had undergone it and yet the Law was nevertheless dissatisfied with them and others, but He declared _It is finished_ before he gave up the ghost. By the dignity of his person he gave that satisfaction which it was impossible for mankind to give.”