By a close
consideration of these two models, which furnish the solution to so
many enigmas, explaining so many truths and throwing so much light
upon the most obscure and the most profound questions, they will
learn by a short and easy method what they should do, and what they
should avoid; they will learn how sin has been propagated, the reason
why it still exists; they will learn how justice and virtue flourish
upon earth, how men turn away from God, and how they return to Him.
It was with reason that God allowed sin and justice to attain us
through the agency of woman, and that her free consent was a
necessary condition for both the ruin and the restoration of the
human race.
It is therefore an interesting and useful study to consider in their
detail and most minute circumstances the acts (so extremely opposed)
of these two women, for one of them, according to the beautiful
expression of the Church, has restored to us by her divine Son what
the other had deprived us of by her disobedience. There is in these
two facts, so different in their nature and results, a wonderful
gradation which points out to us the fatal declivity by which the
human heart insensibly sinks to the lowest abyss of evil, or rises to
the highest degree of virtue and glory.
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