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| Man, Endued with Liberty, Superior to the Angels, Overcomes Even the Angel Which Lured Him to His Fall, When Repentant and Resuming Obedience to God.
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Chapter VIII.—Man, Endued
with Liberty, Superior to the Angels, Overcomes Even the Angel Which
Lured Him to His Fall, When Repentant and Resuming Obedience to
God.
For it was not merely that he might live the
natural life that God had produced man, but2809
| 2809 Ut non, “as if
he were not,” etc. |
that he should live virtuously, that is, in relation to God and to His
law. Accordingly, God gave him to live when he was formed into a
living soul; but He charged him to live virtuously when he was
required to obey a law. So also God shows that man was not constituted
for death, by now wishing that he should be restored to life,
preferring the sinner’s repentance to his death.2810
As, therefore, God designed for man a
condition of life, so man brought on himself a state of death; and
this, too, neither through infirmity nor through ignorance, so that no
blame can be imputed to the Creator. No doubt it was an angel who was
the seducer; but then the victim of that seduction was free, and master
of himself; and as being the
image and likeness of God, was stronger than any angel; and as being,
too, the afflatus of the Divine Being, was nobler than
that material spirit of which angels were made. Who maketh, says
he, His angels spirits, and His ministers a flame of
fire.2811
He would not have
made all things subject to man, if he had been too weak for the
dominion, and inferior to the angels, to whom He assigned no such
subjects; nor would He have put the burden of law upon him, if he had
been incapable of sustaining so great a weight; nor, again, would He
have threatened with the penalty of death a creature whom He knew to be
guiltless on the score of his helplessness: in short, if He had
made him infirm, it would not have been by liberty and independence of
will, but rather by the withholding from him these endowments. And thus
it comes to pass, that even now also, the same human being, the same
substance of his soul, the same condition as Adam’s, is made
conqueror over the same devil by the self-same liberty and power of his
will, when it moves in obedience to the laws of God.2812
| 2812 [On capp. viii.
and ix. See Kaye’s references in notes p. 178 et
seqq.] | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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