How powerful was the bond between Adam and his race, how great and influential the headship which the Divine choice had vested in him, we see in that mysterious transmission of guilt which passed from him to his children. And it must be expressly noted that it was not a transmission of punishment alone. Rather, the divine justice cannot punish where there is no guilt; and as in this case Adam’s fall, and that of his posterity with him, was not merely a loss but a punishment, so it had the special nature of guilt, not only in him but in his posterity, and was a sin both of the person and of the nature in him, of the nature only in them. We see the force and range of the divine endowment of Adam here, though it be in the tenacity of the calamity which ensued to his race; but it must be remembered that such in this respect as the punishment was, the blessing would have been. Adam was created both an individual and a race. In him were two things—the single man and the head; but of these two things the headship was peculiar to himself, while such as the individual Adam was, his race was to be. He had it in his power to break the covenant of his sonship with God, but not the tie between himself and his race. And this sheds a light upon the darkest part of that terrible picture which collected heathenism presents to us. Man, as a social animal, is incessant in his action on his fellow-man; the parent and the family form the child; the companion and the neighbourhood lead forth the child into manhood. This work is perpetually going on in all its parts, and society is the joint result. When, therefore, we see this society once fallen into the possession of a false worship, which perverts the very foundations of morality, and instils deadly error into the child with the mother’s milk, no thoughtful mind can gaze without horror upon beings involved in such a maze,(55) yet intended for an eternal duration. Man’s nature, as a race, seems turned against him; and in addition to the guilt under which each individual of the race is born, and the nature which each inherits, wherein the internal harmony of peace is broken, and neither the appetites obey the reason nor the reason is obedient to God, comes the force of habit, of education, of culture, of companionship, of man’s business and leisure, his play and his earnest, the force of his language, the expression of his thoughts upon himself and others, the whole force, in fact, of man’s social being when it is put under possession of an evil power, man’s adversary. But this social nature was to have been to him the means of the greatest good. As by his natural descent from Adam unfallen would have come the grace of sonship, so the whole brotherhood of those who shared that gift would have helped and supported each in the maintenance of it. The human family would have had a beauty and a unity of its own as such; an order and a lustre would have rested on the whole