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But it is a worse and more damnable pride which casts about for the
shelter of an excuse even in manifest sins, as these our first parents
did, of whom the woman said, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did
eat;" and the man said, "The woman whom Thou gavest to be with
me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." Here there is no word
of begging pardon, no word of entreaty for healing. For though they
do not, like Cain, deny that they have perpetrated the deed, yet
their pride seeks to refer its wickedness to another, the woman's
pride to the serpent, the man's to the woman. But where there is a
plain trangression of a divine commandment, this is rather to accuse
than to excuse oneself. For the fact that the woman sinned on the
serpent's persuasion, and the man at the woman's offer, did not make
the transgression less, as if there were any one whom we ought rather
to believe or yield to than God.
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