ive time to
strengthen Adam's moral powers: I rejoin, he was made with more than
enough of strength infused against any temptation not entering by the
portal of his will: and against the open door of will neither time nor
habits can avail. Moreover, the trial was to be exceedingly simple; no
difficult abstinence, for man might freely eat of every thing but one;
no natural passion tempted; no exertion of intelligence requisite. Adam
lived in a garden; and his Maker, for proof of reasonable obedience,
provides the most easy and obvious test of it--do not eat that apple.
Was it, in reality, an improbable test; an unsuitable one? Was it not,
rather, the likeliest in itself, and the fittest as addressed to the
new-born, rational animal, which imagination could invent, or an amiable
fore-knowledge of all things could desire? Had it been to climb some
arduous height without looking back, or on no account to gaze upon the
sun, how much less apt and easy of obedience! Thus much for the test.

Now, as to the temptation and its ordering. A creature, to be tempted
fairly, must be tempted by another equal or lower creature; and through
the senses. If mere spirit strives with spirit, plus matter, the strife
is unequal: the latter is clogged; he has to fight in the net of
Retiarius. But if both are netted, if both are spirit plus matter, (that
is, material creatures,) there is no unfairness. Therefore, it would
seem reasonable that the Adversary in person should descend from his
mere spirituality into some tangible and humbled form. This could not
well be man's, nor the semblance of man's: for the first pair would well
know that they were all mankind: and, if the Lord God himself was
accustomed to be seen of them as in a glorified humanity, it would be
manifestly a moral incongruity to invest the devil in a similar form. It
must, then, be the shape of some other creature; as a lion, or a lamb,
or--why not a serpent? Is there any improbability here? and not rather
as apt an avatar of the sinuous and wily rebel, the dangerous,
fascinating foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance
could invent? The plain fact is, that Reason--given keenness--might have
guessed this also antecedently a likelihood.

A few words more on other details probable to the temptation. Wonderful
as it may seem to us with our present experience, in the case of the
first woman it would scarcely excite her astonishment to be accosted in
human phrase by