live hereafter and to all eternity the life of the proprium, which is that of spiritual death. For while to live refers to heavenly life when that is the subject treated of, it means infernal life, when the soul is driven forth from Eden.
Thus when the Lord said, "Behold the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil;" that is, when He, in his infinite knowledge, perceived that mankind had eaten of the forbidden fruit, and yet had retained their acknowledgment of the laws of heavenly life approved of the Lord and held by his angels (it is plural, "one of us"), then came into play one of the eternal provisions of Providence. That provision is, that when the human mind falls into spiritual degradation, it shall lose its power of seeing or understanding spiritual truth. To profane is to sink into the lowest depths of evil; to sin without profanation of the truth, is comparatively pardonable. This is in consonance with that teaching of our Lord, which savs: "That servant which knew his Lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes." For the merciful Lord, rather than have willful disobedience, has so ordered the laws of mind, that the supreme love of self shall be attended by loss of the capacity to recognize the love
