God created all things, and pronounced them good. Was evil among these good
things? Man is God's child and image. If God knows evil, so must man, or
the likeness is incomplete, the image marred.

If man must be destroyed by the knowledge of evil, then his destruction
comes through the very knowledge caught from God, and the creature is
punished for his likeness to his creator.

God is commonly called the _sinless_, and man the _sinful_; but if the
thought of sin could be possible in Deity, would Deity then be sinless?
Would God not of necessity take precedence as the infinite sinner, and
human sin become only an echo of the divine?

Such vagaries are to be found in heathen religious history. There are, or
have been, devotees who worship not the good Deity, who will not harm them,
but the bad deity, who seeks to do them mischief, and whom therefore they
wish to bribe with prayers into quiescence, as a criminal appeases, with a
money-bag, the venal officer.

Surely this is no Christian worship! In Christianity man bows to the
infinite perfection which he is bidden to imitate. In Truth, such
terms as _divine sin_ and _infinite sinner_ are unheard-of
contradictions,--absurdities; but _would_ they be sheer nonsense, if God
has, or can have, a real knowledge of sin?




Ways Higher than Our Ways