themselves but also for their successors, if they had persevered in His service.
2. Secondly, I must consider how ungrateful they were to Almighty God, and what motive they had for that; for the serpent coming to tempt Eve, and promising her guilefully that if she ate of the forbidden fruit they should not die, but should rather be as God Himself, having knowledge of good and evil; she suffered herself to be beguiled, ate of the fruit, and invited Adam to do so; who, to please her, ate also of it, treading under foot the pleasure of God for the pleasure of his wife, without making account either of the benefits that God had done him or of the punishments that He had menaced and threatened him with.
3. Then will I consider how terrible Almighty God showed Himself in chastising them, casting them out of paradise, depriving them for ever of original justice, subjecting them to death and to all the miseries of a corruptible body, which miseries all we his children incur; because we all sin in him, and for his cause we are born the children of wrath, [1] enemies of God, and adjudged and condemned to the self-same death. And that which more affrights is, that from this original sin that we inherit of him, proceed as from their root those innumerable sins that are in the world, and the inundations of miseries that overflow it, [2] by which I may perceive how terrible, dreadful, and hideous an evil mortal sin is, seeing one alone deprives of so much good, brings so much evil, and so highly provokes the wrath of Almighty God, though He be much more inclined to mercy than to the rigour of justice.
Colloquy. —Who shall not fear Thee, [3] O King of worlds? Who shall not abhor so great a mischief as to offend Thee? O my soul, if thou knowest what thou dost when thou sinnest like Adam, doubtless
