In what sense was this called, “The tree of the knowledge of good and evil”? (Gen. 2: 9, 17 and 3: 5)――――It brought the knowledge of evil by fearful experience; the knowledge of good to a certain extent by the freshened sense of contrast with the experience of evil. Sin gives to moral beings _such_ knowledge of good and of evil――knowledge it were better far for them they should never have! _Was the fruit of this tree a natural poison?_ We do not know. God has not told us. It may have been or it may not. God does not base his prohibition on this ground. There are other grounds, all-sufficient, without this. It might perhaps be urged with some plausibility that the analogy of this earthly life favors the affirmative inasmuch as for the most part, God’s prohibitions of food and indeed of animal indulgence in general, are based on this principle――Abstain from poison; do thyself no harm. God is not wont to prohibit aught that is good for food or pleasurable to any sense, except because it is pernicious, poisonous. What was this threatened penalty? _Death, in what sense?_ In the same sense in which it actually falls upon all who reject Christ and fail of his salvation. Upon such the curse of the law falls without abatement or modification. Their doom must surely be taken as the exponent and measure of the meaning of this threatened death. Of course it includes the loss of God’s favor; the incurring of his frown.――――That eternal death did not begin instantly was due to arrest of judgment for a new probation under the scheme of redemption; and to nothing else. _Was natural death a part of this penalty?_――――Plainly natural death became the doom of the race, equally of the redeemed and of the unredeemed, under the scheme of redemption――a scheme which carried with it more or less of earthly life before the death of the body. But this proves nothing as to the breadth of the original threatening――“Thou shalt surely die.” What would have been in respect to natural death if no scheme of redemption had intervened and the original threatening had been executed at once, we have no means of knowing. Mortality as at present resting on the race and terminating in natural death is one of the incidents of the new probation under mercy, and gives us no light on the other question, viz. What if no mercy had come in? In general, it is of small account for us to ask, What would have been if something else had happened otherwise than it did? _e. g._ What would have taken place if the first pair had endured all temptation? How long would the trial have continued? Would it have terminated by removing the tree, or by taking off the prohibition, or only by such complete victory over temptation that its presence could have been only a joy and a triumph?――――What part would have been borne by “the tree of life”? And after their sin, what if they had put forth their hand to take and eat of this life-tree?――――Speculations of this sort never make men wiser.