Adam is to be obedient is in the simplest form. There is
restriction. 'Thou shalt not' is the first form of law, and it is a
form congruous with the undeveloped, though as yet innocent, nature
ascribed to him. The conception of duty is present, though in a very
rudimentary shape. An innocent being may be aware of limitations,
though as yet not 'knowing good and evil.' With deep truth the story
represents the first suggestion of disobedience as presented from
without. No doubt, it might have by degrees arisen from within, but
the thought that it was imported from another sphere of being
suggests that it is alien to true manhood, and that, if brought in
from without, it may be cast out again. And the temptation had a
personal source. There are beings who desire to draw men away from
God. The serpent, by its poison and its loathly form, is the natural
symbol of such an enemy of man. The insinuating slyness of the
suggestions of evil is like the sinuous gliding of the snake, and
truly represents the process by which temptation found its way into
the hearts of the first pair, and of all their descendants. For it
begins with casting a doubt on the reality of the prohibition. 'Hath
God said?' is the first parallel opened by the besieger. The
fascinations of the forbidden fruit are not dangled at first before
Eve, but an apparently innocent doubt is filtered into her ear. And
is not that the way in which we are still snared? The reality of
moral distinctions, the essential wrongness of the sin, is obscured
by a mist of sophistication. 'There is no harm in it' steals into
some young man's or woman's mind about things that were forbidden at
home, and they are half conquered before they know that they have
been attacked. Then comes the next besieger's trench, much nearer
the wall--namely, denial of the fatal consequences of the sin: 'Ye
shall not surely die,' and a base hint that the prohibition was
meant, not as a parapet to keep from falling headlong into the