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

—402 GENIUS OP THE PAPACY.the woman was taught that she had only to partake, and, invirtue of the act, would be as God, knowing good and evil.Here already were worTcs substituted in the room o^ faith : insteadof the passive obedience which the covenant demanded,in the faith that God would bestow the life he had promised,the woman was taught to do a certain work by which thatlife was to be attained. And here was the doctrine of humanmerit, salvation of man substituted in the room oi salvationof God ; for the woman was led to look for life, notfrom God, but from the tree, in the way of using itsfruits.All the master errors of the Papacy,—those errors whichin the standard books of Rome take theform of canons orof pontifical bulls, and which in her temples take the formof gorgeous and idolatrous rites,—were promulgated for thefirst time in Eden, and by this preacher, not, indeed, in expressterms, but by implication : the policy of Satan proceededon a principle which embraced them all. Yetfarther, we find Satan teaching Eve that she could notunderstand the command of God without note and comment,and offering himself as an infallible interpreter, andnot more grossly perverting the text than Rome has done ininnumerable instances since. The boastful claims of thePapist and the Puseyite to a high antiquity are not withoutsome foundation after all. In one sense. Popery, and itsmodern Anglican form Puseyism, ar,e mediaeval error; inanother they are but a development of that false principleby which Eve was seduced, and mankind precipitatedintocondemnation and death.We can clearly trace the policy of Satan in the earlypolytheisms ; and we find that policy in its essential principlesunchanged. The pagan idolatries were manifestly thesubstitution of the counterfeit for the real. Satan, theirauthor, did not deny that there is a God, or that it is man'sduty to worship him. He reserved these truths as a fixedpoint, on which to rest the lever by which he was to movethe world.But in the room of God, one, invisible, and spiritual,he substituted those material objects which most re-