112.  IV.  ’They ate thereof nevertheless, and thenceforth they were condemned, they and all their posterity, to the miseries of this life, to temporal death and eternal damnation, and made subject to such a tendency to sin that they abandoned themselves thereto endlessly and without ceasing.’  There is reason to suppose that the forbidden action by itself entailed these evil results in accordance with a natural effect, and that it was for that very reason, and not by a purely arbitrary decree, that God had forbidden it:  much as one forbids knives to children.  The famous Fludde or de Fluctibus, an Englishman, once wrote a book De Vita, Morte et Resurrectione under the name of R. Otreb, wherein he maintained that the fruit of the forbidden tree was a poison:  but we cannot enter into this detail.  It suffices that God forbade a harmful thing; one must not therefore suppose that God acted here simply in the character of a legislator who enacts a purely positive law, or of a judge who imposes and inflicts a punishment by an order of his will, without any connexion between the evil of guilt and the evil of punishment.  And it is not necessary to suppose that God in justifiable annoyance deliberately put a corruption in the soul and the body of man, by an extraordinary action, in order to punish him:  much as the Athenians gave hemlock-juice to their criminals.  M. Bayle takes the matter thus:  he speaks as if the original corruption had been put in the soul of the first man by an order and operation of God.  It is that which calls forth his objection (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol.  III, ch. 178, p. 1218) ’that reason would not commend the monarch who, in order to chastise a rebel, condemned him and his descendants to have a tendency towards rebellion’.  But this chastisement happens naturally to the wicked, without any ordinance of a legislator, and they become addicted to evil.  If drunkards begot children inclined to the same vice, by a natural consequence of what takes place in bodies, that would be a punishment of their progenitors, but it would [185] not be a penalty of law.  There is something comparable to this in the consequences of the first man’s sin.  For the contemplation of divine wisdom leads us to believe that the realm of nature serves that of grace; and that God as an Architect has done all in a manner befitting God considered as a Monarch.  We do not sufficiently know the nature of the forbidden fruit, or that of the action, or its effects, to judge of the details of this matter:  nevertheless we must do God justice so far as to believe that it comprised something other than what painters depict for us.