They were deceived from themselves, and their own apprehensions; for _Eve_ either mistook, or traduced the commandment of God. _Of every Tree of the Garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat: for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shall surely die._ Now _Eve_ upon the question of the _Serpent_, returned the Precept in different terms: _You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, less perhaps you die._ In which delivery, there were no less than two mistakes, or rather additional mendacities; for the Commandment forbad not the touch of the Fruit; and positively said, _Ye shall surely die_: but she extenuating, replied, _ne fortè moriamini, lest perhaps ye die_. For so in the vulgar translation it runneth, and so it is expressed in the _Thargum_ or Paraphrase of _Jonathan_. And therefore although it be said, and that very truely, _that the Devil was a lyer from the beginning_, yet was the Woman herein the first express beginner: and falsified twice, before the reply of _Satan_. And therefore also, to speak strictly, the sin of the Fruit was not the first Offence: They first transgressed the Rule of their own Reason; and after the Commandment of God. They were deceived through the Conduct of their Senses, and by Temptations from the Object it self; whereby although their intellectuals had not failed in the Theory of truth, yet did the inservient and brutal Faculties controll the suggestion of Reason: Pleasure and Profit already overswaying the instructions of Honesty, and Sensuality perturbing the reasonable commands of Vertue. For so it is delivered in the Text: That when the Woman saw, _that the Tree was good for food_, and _that it was pleasant unto the eye_, and _a Tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat_. Now hereby it appeareth, that _Eve_, before the Fall, was by the same and beaten away of allurements inveigled, whereby her posterity hath been deluded ever since; that is, those three delivered by St. _John, The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life_: Where indeed they seemed as weakly to fail, as their debilitated posterity, ever after. Whereof notwithstanding, some in their imperfection, have resisted more powerful temptations; and in many moralities condemned the facility of their seductions. [Sidenote: Adam _whence (probably) induced to eat._] [Sidenote: _Whether_ Cain _intended to kill_ Abel.]