Chapter 13.—What Was the First
Punishment of the Transgression of Our First Parents.
For, as soon as our first parents
had transgressed the commandment, divine grace forsook them, and
they were confounded at their own wickedness; and therefore they
took fig-leaves (which were possibly the first that came to hand in
their troubled state of mind), and covered their shame; for though
their members remained the same, they had shame now where they had
none before. They experienced a new motion of their flesh, which
had become disobedient to them, in strict retribution of their own
disobedience to God. For the soul, revelling in its own liberty,
and scorning to serve God, was itself deprived of the command it
had formerly maintained over the body. And because it had
willfully deserted its superior Lord, it no longer held its own
inferior servant; neither could it hold the flesh subject, as it
would always have been able to do had it remained itself subject to
God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit,
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in which
strife we are born, deriving from the first transgression a seed of
death, and bearing in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the
contest or even victory of the flesh.
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Gal. v. 17
.