Page:The Garden of Eden (Doughty).djvu/48

42 take from you the power of sin," would that have made a perfect man, when true purity is the voluntary choice of good? The ox, the lamb and the dove have their gentle natures, but they are beasts and birds. Man is man by virtue of his freedom. He is no brute to live and die without choice or reason. Freedom to obey, involves the power to disobey. Freedom of determination is the highest gift to created intelligence; and it implies the noblest qualities, the greatest happiness and the grandest good the Lord can give; and God could not have made his noblest creature—man, with an angel's destiny—and denied him that which lifts him above the brute and makes him man, the noble gift of freedom.

Therefore the power of obedience implies the power of disobedience. We have it, and none can deny the fact. If we had it not, the punishment of crime would be itself a crime. That we justify our courts and penitentiaries, is a confession of our belief in the moral freedom of man. When, therefore, the Lord commanded man to obey his law of love, and gave him the power to obey, the power to disobey was clearly involved in it; and He had either to plant both trees in the ground of his mind, or none. He had either to make him man or make him brute.

It is for man wisely to use this gift of freedom. It is for him to love and live, not to center his