THE CREATION AND FALL From the first man, Adam, we all are sprung; in him the whole human race was incorporated, since there is no one of us that does not come from him; he was the whole human race when God made him. He gave him, along with many other gifts, the three things necessary. He gave him the twofold Truth — the knowledge, that is, of the purpose of the human race and of the laws by which it must be governed if it is to avoid disaster. He gave him the Supernatural Life. Adam, then, had the natural life that made him man — the union of spiritual soul and material body which constituted his nature as man, without which he would not have been man: and this natural life he had in a state of perfection, all his powers and faculties rightly ordered, body subordinate to soul, soul ruled by reason. He also had the Supernatural Life — the life above nature — that whereby he would be able to live the life of Heaven hereafter, whereby even in this life his whole soul was “supernaturalized,” capable of a relationship with God altogether higher and holier than anything that could take its rise in man’s merely natural endowments. The highest and holiest point of this relationship and the very condition of the Supernatural Life was for Adam, as it is for all men, the union of the soul to God by love. And while he had the Supernatural Life, God also exempted his nature from the law of death — from the separation of soul and body which is the natural termination of man’s life on this earth. 39