The next statement we have, “And the eyes of them both were opened.” But how were they opened? Each of them had two good eyes before eating the fruit; in fact, Eve had been admiring the fruit as it hung among the branches of the tree, and as she had turned it over in her hands. Before they tasted they saw with their natural eyes. Now they see with a higher knowledge of sense--there is added a con-sense--a conscience or self-consciousness. In the relation between the antecedent here and what followed there evidently lies a terrible irony. The promise of the tempter becomes half fulfilled, though, indeed, in a sadly different sense from what they had supposed. They had attained, in consequence, to a moral insight. Self-consciousness was awakened with their knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil. It belongs to the very beginning of moral cognition and development. How strange it all is. Eden full of trees, fruits of every kind, luscious and satisfying, but, excited by false and wicked statements in respect to the prohibition of the fruit of one tree, she straightway desires to taste for herself, and that curiosity blasted her and blasted all nations. And thousands in every generation, inspired by unhealthful inquisitiveness, have tried to look through the keyhole of God’s mysteries--mysteries that were barred and bolted from all human inspection--and they have wrenched their whole moral nature out of joint by trying to pluck fruit from branches beyond their reach. We may also learn that fruits which are sweet to the taste may afterward produce great agony. Forbidden fruit for Eve was so pleasant she invited her husband also to take of it; but her banishment from paradise and years of sorrow and wretchedness and woe paid for that luxury. Sometimes people plead for just one indulgence in sin. There can be no harm to go to this or that forbidden place just once. Doubtless that one Edenic transgression did not seem to be much, but it struck a blow which to this day makes the earth stagger. To find out the consequences of that one sin you would have to compel the world to throw open all its prison doors and display the crime, throw open all its hospitals and display the disease, throw open all the insane asylums and show the wretchedness, open all the sepulchres and show the dead, open all the doors of the lost world and show the damned. That one Edenic transgression stretched chords of misery across the heart of the world and struck them with dolorous wailing, and it has seated the plagues upon the air and the shipwrecks upon the tempest, and fastened, like a leech, famine to the heart of the sick and dying nations. Beautiful at the start, horrible at the last. Oh, how many have experienced it! Beware of entertaining temptations to first sins! Turn away and flee for thy life to the sure and only Refuge--Christ Jesus.