t in and through Him. Mysterious as it
is, the very prison beneath the earth, its chains and fires and
impenitent inmates, the very author of evil himself, is sustained in
existence by God, and without God would fall into nothing. God is in
hell as well as in heaven, a thought which almost distracts the mind to
think of. The awful God! "Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit, or
whither shall I go from Thy Presence? If I climb up into heaven, Thou
art there; if I go down to hell, Thou art there also." Where life is,
there is He; and though it be but the life of death--the living death
of eternal torment--He is the principle of it. And being thus
intimately present with the very springs of thought, and the first
elements of all being, being the sustaining cause of all spirits,
whether they be good or evil, He is intimately present with evil, being
pure from it--and knows what it is, as being with and in the wretched
atoms which originate it.

If there be this sort of connexion between God's knowledge and
sufferance of evil, see what an ambition it was in our first parents to
desire to know it without experiencing it; it was, indeed, to desire to
be as gods,--to know the secrets of the prison-house, and to see the
worm that dieth not, yet remain innocent and happy.

This they understood not; they desired something which they knew not
that they could not have, remaining as they were; they did not see how
knowledge and experience went together in the case of human nature; and
Satan did not undeceive them. They ate of the tree which was to make
them wise, and, alas! they saw clearly what sin was, what shame, what
death, what hell, what despair. They lost God's presence, and they
gained the knowledge of evil. They lost Eden, and they gained a
conscience.

This, in fact, is the knowledge of good and evil. Lost spirits do not
know good. Angels do not know evil. Beings like ourselves, fallen
beings, fallen yet not cast away, know good and evil; evil not external
to them, nor yet one with them; but in them, yet not simply of them.
Such was the fruit of the forbidden tree, as it remains in us to this
day.

We do not know in what the duty and happiness of other beings consist;
but at least this seems to have been man's happiness in Paradise, not
to think about himself or to be conscious of himself. Such, too, to
recur to the parallel especially suggested on this day, seems to be the
state of children. They do not re