But the First Man, the Father and Head of the race, did not stand in his inheritance. He broke the divine command, and lost the gift of sonship, and with it all the prerogatives attendant on that gift, which were above nature and rooted in grace, and which the eminent goodness of God had bestowed upon him: and by the terms of the original charter lost the gift, not only for himself, but for his race. But he did not, therefore, destroy that relation between the Head and the Race, which was part of the original foundation of God. This continued; but whereas it had been intended to communicate the blessing of adoption, it now served to communicate the demerit of adoption lost, the guilt, and with it the punishment incurred by that loss. This is the original sin, the sin of the nature, not of the person, inherited by the members of Adam’s body; and as there can be no sin without free-will, the sin of the whole nature included in Adam as its Root and Head, which sinned by Adam’s abuse of his free-will. Let us try to determine as accurately as we can the position into which Adam and his race fell. Did, then, Adam simply lose with the forfeiture of sanctifying grace the gift of sonship, the supernatural inheritance, all which God had bestowed on him beyond that ideal state of pure nature which we described in the first instance? God, we said, might have created man originally in this condition, and man so created, that is, in virtue of this creation, would not have been under any sin, nor exposed to the anger of God. Did man, by Adam’s sin, fall back into it? Not so. His state after his fall differed from such a state of pure nature in that he had upon him the guilt of lost adoption, of adoption lost by the first Adam’s fault, and in proportion to the greatness of the loss, and the gratuitousness of the gift originally bestowed, was the anger with which, on the donor’s part, the loss was regarded. How would a king, a man like ourselves, regard one whom he had raised out of the dust to be his adopted child, and who had been unfaithful to the parent who had so chosen him with more than natural affection? Such an anger we can indeed understand when felt against the person sinning; but we fail to enter into it as resting on the race, because the secret tie which binds the head and the race into one is not discerned by us; because too the greatness of the divine majesty, the awfulness of His sovereignty, and the wrath of that majesty slighted, are feebly appreciated by us. But this image may at least give us some notion of the nature of that divine anger which pressed upon Adam and his race after the fall. Not only, therefore, was the gift of sonship and the prerogatives attending it withdrawn, but this withdrawal was a punishment, which their absence in the presumed case of an original state of simple nature would not have been. Thus death was a punishment to Adam and his race; the body’s weakness and disease, the soul’s sorrows and pains, the