spot where man had dwelt; his birthplace, his first home, where he
But why was it allowed to remain at all? Surely this was no piece of chance, no thing without a meaning or an end?
1. To be a monument of what sin had done. There stood the happy spot where man had dwelt; his birthplace, his first home, where he had walked with God. In looking at it daily, as he wandered round the sacred inclosure which he dared not to enter, he was reminded of what he had lost, and how it had been lost. Sin had done it all. "Had it not been for sin"
* Thus Milton describes it. Speaking of the deluge, he says,—
" . . . . . . Then shall this mount
Of Paradise by might of waves be moved
Out of his place, push'd by the horned flood,
With all his verdure spoil'd and trees adrift,
Down the great river to the opening gulf."
Paradise Lost, b. xi.
(he might muse with himself), "I might have still been there, still happy, and dwelling amid the brightness that seems even yet to linger yonder: but sin has made me homeless, sin has spoiled me of my heritage; each day I am reminded of the greatness of my loss, and each day humbled at the thought that my own sin is the cause." Every cloud that rested over it, every trace of decay that appeared on it, every leaf that was seen to fall, or was drifted over the enclosure into the plain without, would be to man a memorial of what sin had done—done to himself, done to Paradise. Thus sin was embittered, and Adam humbled.