of order — his soul and its higher powers subject to God, his lower nature subject to his reason and will, and the whole visible universe subject to the composite man. The world was then an earthly paradise, no labor, no want, no affliction from without, no misery from within, but happiness and immortality here, and the assured vision of God hereafter. But man, like the angels, was tried, and man, like the angels, fell. The angels sought equality with God in power, and man, equally guilty, sought equality with God in knowledge. And as in their case so in other and all cases: self-exaltation ended in humiliation, for God anathematized man and freed his subjects from their allegiance to him. " Cursed be the earth," He said, " thorns and thistles will it bear thee. Thou shalt labor and toil all the days of thy life, and as dust thou art, so unto dust thou shalt return." Original sin, with its effects, was the complete subversion of the primitive harmony established between God and man, between man's higher and lower natures, and between man and the world; and this sin and its effects we all inherit. " Behold," says the Psalmist, " I was conceived in iniquities, and in sin did my mother conceive me." And St. Paul adds, " as by one man sin entered this world, and by sin death; so death hath passed upon all men from him in whom all men have sinned." As the wages of sin is death, and as all men die, we must naturally conclude that all men are conceived children of wrath in original sin. It stains the unborn, and the newly-born; it stains man in whatever stage of unbaptized existence
