The-papacy-its-history-dogmas-genius-and-prospects-wylie

400 GENIUS OF THE PAPACY.the Papacy, viewed as an emanation from Satan, is to besought for in the history of the seduction of our first parents.Satan^s policy has been substantially the same from the beginning.Of course, that policy has been modified by circumstances,and adapted in a masterly manner to each successiveemergency. Its front of opposition has been moreor less extended, according as it stood arrayed againstbuta single truth or a whole system of truths ; but it has employedsubstantially the same policy throughout. The generalmay employ the same rule of military tactics in the preliminaryskirmish as in the more complicated manoeuvres ofthe battle that succeeds. In like manner, Satan employedthe identical policy in the assault in the Garden which hedeveloped more fully in thesecular and ecclesiastical dominationwhich he set up in an after age in Western Europe.The study of the simpler event, then, furnishes a key for thesolution of the greater and more complicated.What, then, was his policy in the Garden I It may besummed up in one word : it was a dexterous substitution ofthe counterfeit for the t^eal. The real in this case was, thatlife was to come to our first parents through the tree as thesr/mholic cause; the counterfeit which Satan succeeded inpalming upon them was, that life was to come to themthrough that tree as the efficacious cause. They were tohave this life not from, but 5y the tree. The life was notin the tree, but beyond it,—in God, from whom they were toreceive it, in the way of submitting to his ordinance. Butby a train of subtle and fallacious argument,—not moresubtle and fallacious, however, than that which Rome stillemploys,—the woman was brought to regard the tree as theefficacious cause of the life which she had been promised,and to which she had been bidden aspire ; she was broughtto believe that the life was in the tree, and that she hadonly to eat of the tree, and this life would be hers." Whenthe woman saw,*" it is said, that it was " a tree to be desiredto make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof."It isplain that she believed the tree able of itself to make her