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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, 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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