manded
him freely to eat of all the heavenly trees therein, but forbade him
wholly the taste of a certain one which was called the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, thus saying, 'In the day that ye eat
thereof ye shall surely die.' But one of the aforesaid angel powers,
the marshall of one host, though he bore in himself no trace of natural
evil from his Maker's hand but had been created for good, yet by his
own free and deliberate choice turned aside from good to evil, and was
stirred up by madness to the desire to take up arms against his Lord
God. Wherefore he was cast out of his rank and dignity, and in the
stead of his former blissful glory and angelick name received the name
of the 'Devil' and 'Satan' for his title. God banished him as unworthy
of the glory above. And together with him there was drawn away and
hurled forth a great multitude of the company of angels under him, who
were evil of choice, and chose in place of good, to follow in the
rebellion of their leader. These were called Devils, as being deluders
and deceivers.

"Thus then did the devil utterly renounce the good, and assume an evil
nature; and he conceived spite against man, seeing himself hurled from
such glory, and man raised to such honour; and he schemed to oust him
from that blissful state. So he took the serpent for the workshop of
his own guile. Through him he conversed with the woman, and persuaded
her to eat of that forbidden tree in the hope of being as God, and
through her he deceived Adam also, for that was the first man's name.
So Adam ate of the tree of disobedience, and was banished by his maker
from that paradise of delight, and, in lieu of those happy days and
that immortal life, fell alas! into this life of misery and woe, and
at the last received sentence of death. Thenceforth the devil waxed
strong and boastful through his victory; and, as the race of man
multiplied, he prompted them in all manner of wickedness. So, wishing
to cut short the growth of sin, God brought a deluge on the earth, and
destroyed every living soul. But one single righteous man did God find
in that generation; and him, with wife and children, he saved alive in
an Ark, and set him utterly desolate on earth. But, when the human
race again began to multiply, they forgat God, and ran into worse
excess of wickedness, being in subjection to divers sins and ruined in
strange delusions, and wandering apart into many branches of error.

"Some de