to estimate their value.happy state in which God had placed our first parents, let the pastor be particularly careful to make known to the faithful, the cause of this common misery and universal calamity. When Adam had departed from the obedience due to God, and had violated the prohibition, "of every tree of Paradise thou shall eat; but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat, for in what day soever thou shalt eat it, thou shalt die the death;?[1] he fell into the extreme misery of losing the sanctity and righteousness in which he was created; and of becoming subject to all those other evils, which are detailed more at large by the holy Council of Trent. [2] The Pastor, therefore, will not omit to remind the faithful, that the guilt and punishment of original sin were not confined to Adam, but justly descended from him, as from their source and cause, to all posterity. The human race, having fallen from their elevated dignity, no power of men or angels could raise them from their fallen condition, and replace them in their primitive state. To remedy the evil, and repair the loss, it became necessary that the Son of God, whose merits are infinite, clothed in the weakness of our flesh, should remove the infinite weight of sin, and reconcile us to God in his blood. The belief and profession of this our redemption, as God declared from the beginning, are now, and always have been, necessary to salvation. In the sentence of condemnation, pronounced against the human race immediately after the sin of Adam, the hope of redemption was held out in these words, which denounced to the devil, the loss which he was to sustain by man's redemption: " I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed: she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." [3] The same promise he again often confirmed, and more distinctly signified his counsels to those chiefly whom he desired to make special objects of his predilection: amongst others to the patriarch Abraham, to whom he often declared this mystery, but then more explicitly when, in obedience to God's command, he was prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac: " Because," says he, " thou hast done this thing, and hast not spared thy only begotten son for my sake; I will bless thee, and I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand that is by the sea shore. Thy seed shall possess the gates of their enemies, and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice." [4] From these words it was easy to infer that he, who was to deliver man kind from the ruthless tyranny of Satan, was to be descended from Abraham; and that, whilst he was the Son of God, he was to be born of the seed of Abraham according to the flesh. Not long after, to preserve the memory of this promise, he renewed the same covenant with Jacob, the grandson of Abraham. When in a vision Jacob saw a ladder standing on earth, and its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending by it, [5] he also heard the Lord saying to him, as the Scripture How we may learn
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