#4 Burnt Fingers

[Pryer 1.14]  Let me be honest here.  If your father, and I'm sure yours did, tell you not to put your finger on a hot burner or through a fire, and then you did, would you blame your father for telling you and so putting the idea into your head or do you blame yourself for testing his advice and seeing indeed what would happen?

So too, Adam  who operated contrary to the Will of God merely for the  Sake of some new-fancy operated from his own voluntary Act, decided to test what God has told him knowing fulling well that the punishment would be the lost of his heavenly life; did so anyways, somewhat like a rogue child that gives you the finger and figures that he will get away with it because you do not have the heart to really take him to task.

[Pryer 1.15]  ] Well, that is a simple, but clear Representation of the Case, how Matters stood

Pietro della Vecchia, St Dominic and the Devil c. 1630
 at the Indianapolis Museum of Art

betwixt God and our first Father, when by his own Act and Deed he extinguished that Angelical & Divine Life, in which God had created him.

Adam had no more Hurt, no more Evil done to Him, at his Fall, than the very Nature of his own Action brought along with it upon himself. He lusted after the Sensibility of that Good and Evil, that Beasts of this World have,

Léonard Gaultier, engraving of Christ heals the 2 Blind Men,
c. 1576  @Natl Gallery of Art, Washington DC

He was told, that it could not be had without the Loss of his heavenly Life;  because such Loss was as necessarily implied in the Nature of the Thing itself, as  Blindness is implied in the Extinction of the Eyes.

However, he ventured to make the Trial, and chose to eat of That, which could and did open this Sensibility of earthly Good and Evil in him.

No sooner did this happen & this Sensibility was opened in him, but he found that it lead to Subjection and Slavery to all outward Nature, to Heat and Cold, to Pains and Sickness, to Horror of Mind and disturbed Passions, to Misery and Fears of Death or  in other Words, he found that it was an Extinction of that Divine, angelical Nature, that he previously had.

 Therefore, to charge Adam's now miserable State, as a Punishment inflicted upon him by the severe Wrath of an incensed God, is just as Absurd as to say that when Man washes his face with Carbolic Acid, that the Darkness and Blindness results from God's wrath against him.