A Supplement to the preceding Dissertation.

THOUGII the preceding hypothesis of Dr. Shuckford, concerning The Creation and Fall of Man, is supported with considerable ingenuity and learning; yet it is so very discordant from generally received and long established opinions, that there is some reason to fear that most readers will hesitate to receive it, as having its foundation in reason and truth.

To represent man, when just coming from the hand of his all perfect Creator, as little better than the most uncultivated savage; knowing little or nothing of his being and its end, and having almost every thing to learn from the slow progress of experience; ill accords with the opinions of almost all religious people, on the original state and perfection of man.

Foreseeing that these particulars of the author's Creed will give but little satisfaction to many; the Editor begs leave to close the preceding Dissertation with the following extract of a Discourse by the learned Vitringa on the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Observ. Sacr. tome ii. lib. iv. c. 12.

On the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

THE Passages on which the present enquiry is founded, are in the second chapter of Genesis, ver. 9, 17. Out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food: the tree of life also in the midst of the garden; and the tree of knowledge of good and evil-and the Lord God com

manded the man, saying-of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

We propose to shew why this tree was denominated, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; and what was the design of prohibiting the use of it to our first pa

rents.

The current opinion, respecting the first of these points, is, that the tree received its denomination from the event; because our first parents having fallen in consequence of eating of its fruit, knew, by experience, the good which they had lost, and the evil which they had incurred.

This interpretation, though patronized by great names, and maintained by able pens, labours under insuperable difficulty: and that, whether we suppose the tree to have been so called by God himself before the issue, or by Moses after it. The difficulties are these:

1. The Hebrew phrase, to my, i. e. knowledge of good and evil,' cannot well bear such a construction. To know good and evil,' in the style of the scripture, is to understand the nature of good and evil, of right and wrong; and judging accurately concerning them, to choose the one, and shun the other. In this lies the force of the tempter's argument to the woman, ye shall be as God, b, knowing good and evil.' God cannot know evil by experience; and the devil was not such a fool as to think of seducing our parents by assuring them that misery would be the reward of compliance. So afterwards, in that pathetic lamenta tion, not sarcastic jeer, over the poor apostates: 'Behold the man, (who) was n as one of us: to know

good and evil." Here man is said to have known good, and evil before his fall. After it, he knew evil by experience, but not good; and his faculty of judging correctly concerning both, was woefully perverted. He knew good and evil, as God knows them: not by experiment surely, but by a clear perception of their na tures; for it is thus only that God can know evil; and as it is absurd and blasphemous to imagine, that man, by plunging himself into sin, could become like God; his knowledge of good and evil must have been possessed in the state of innocence, and consequently could not consist in the experience of both.

If any doubt remain, as to the scriptural use of the phrase, it will probably be removed by a passage in Deuteronomy, chap. i. 39. Your little ones, which ye said should be a prey; and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between' (or of)' good and evil, they shall go in thither.' Little children do actually experience good and evil; but they have no discri minating acquaintance with the nature of either; they can form no judgment on the subject, so as to choose the one and refuse the other. Such being the sense of the expression, to know good and evil,' it is evident, that the tree in question was not denominated from its reference to the Fall of Man.

2. If we now repair to the fact, we shall strengthen our interpretation.

It is not true, then, that man, fallen from his state of

a Gen. iii. 22. Vide Boston, Tractatus Stigmologicas, p. 30, 31.

integrity and blessedness into a state of sin and misery, did or could, by such experience, know good. With evil, indeed, he acquired a practical acquaintance, as he had previously known it only in theory. But how he should learn good, from being thrust headlong into the depths of calamity, being both excluded and alienated, by sin, from the love and fellowship of God, and from all real joy, is most inconceivable! By contrast,’ you will say, his misery taught him the value of the good which he had forfeited.' Certainly. But this solution supposes that he did not know good when he was in full possession of it: and it is inconsistent with the idea of experience. For to learn a thing by experience, implies the presence of the thing when the experiment is made. But the good was now gone, and therefore could not be a subject of experience..

very

Let us go on to ask, what end was to be gained by naming the tree from the event? Did the most high God design to reveal to man, by such an anticipation, his approaching crime and wretchedness? But how does it accord with the divine wisdom to appoint a tree. as the test of his obedience, and to proclaim, in the appellation of the tree, his future disobedience, and its dire effects? Shall we say, that he did not understand. the meaning of the appellation? With what view was it bestowed, then? To the Creator it was of no use; for man's sake it must have been given. But how for man's sake, if its sense was withheld from him? Will it be said, on the other hand, that the name was not annexed to the tree, till man had discovered, by his fall, the relation which it bore to his condition and prospects? But still, what benefit could accrue from his learning,

when his probation was over, that his state had been prefigured by the name of the tree?

It appears, then, that the tree was not denominated from the event; and that the knowledge of good and evil,' is not such a knowledge as arises from experience. We must look for something more satisfactory..

To know good and evil, does in truth denote that faculty of judgment by which a rational being distinguishes good from evil, choosing the former and rejecting the latter that which Paul styles, dianpor xaλOD TO xai xaxoub the discerning between good and evil. Assuming this, as having been proved before, there are only two reasons for the denomination of the tree. Either it was endued with some physical virtue of sharpening the powers of man in discriminating between good and evil; or it was placed in paradise, not as a physical, but moral, cause of that knowledge, warning him to avoid death, and the source of death, which were figured by that tree; and to cleave to life, the opposite of death.

The first of these, although it has amused some speculative minds, is hardly tenable. For it is not easy to see why the Creator should forbid the use of a tree to which he had imparted the quality of perfecting man's faculty of judging; nor how, upon this supposition, he could be free from the imputation of tempting his creature to sin, by the very means which he had selected as a criterion of duty: nor, finally, how the taste of a tree possessing such singular virtue, should have produced,

VOL. IV.

b Heb. v. 14.