Page:Studies in the Scriptures - Series I - The Plan of the Ages (1909).djvu/126

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ways have been a possibility ; besides which, good would never have been so highly appreciated except by its contrast with evil*

God first made his creatures acquainted with good, sur- rounding them with it in Eden ; and afterward, as a penalty for disobedience, he gave them a severe knowledge of evil. Expelled from Eden and deprived of fellowship with himself, God let them experience sickness, pain and death, that they might thus forever know evil and the inexpediency and exceeding sinfulness of sin.

By a comparison of results they came to an appreciation and proper estimate of both j " And the Lord said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil" (Gen. 3 : 22.) In this their posterity share, except that they first obtain their knowledge of evil, and cannot fully realize what good is until they experience it in the Millennium, as a result of their redemption by him who will then be their Judge and King.

The moral sense, or judgment of right and wrong, and the liberty to use it, which Adam possessed, were important features of his likeness to God. The law of right and wrong was written in his natural constitution. It was a part of his nature, just as it is a part of the divine nature. But let us not forget that this image or likeness of God, this originally law-inscribed nature of man, has lost much of its clear out- line through the erasing, degrading influence of sin j hence it is not now what it was in the first man- Ability to love implies ability to hate ; hence we may reason that the Creator could not make man in his own likeness, with power to love and to do right, without the corresponding ability to hate and to do wrong. This liberty of choice, termed free moral agency, or free will, is a part of man's original endowment , and this, together with the full measure of his mental and moral faculties, constituted him an image of his Creator

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