amusement whenever you give me so good a reason to laugh. It remains a firm and infallible foundation, then, that Adam was first instructed concerning the Passion. In relation to it, he was further taught to sacrifice and offer the blood of beasts as types and forerunners of Christ Jesus’s blood: the altars of the law were merely steps towards the Gospel’s Cross. If it is objected that various nations sacrificed without knowing God at all, much less God’s Son, the prototype and perfection of all offerings, I answer that the practice of sacrifice was communicated to the heathen through tradition from the first man. Having instructed his own children, they passed it on to their descendants. Thus this mask of religion remained, although its substance and true doctrine were lost. In my opinion it is sufficiently clear, therefore, that the earliest people sacrificed through revelation or through custom and tradition, rather than by Nature, as Porphyry, that enemy of our religion, would have it. But now I think of it, Scripture confirms this original revelation. For Solomon, numbering the blessings divine Wisdom imparted to the ancient fathers, specifies among them her kindness towards Adam: “She preserved

(he says) the first-formed father of the world, created alone, and brought him out of his fall.” Here I find Adam restored to some degree. How could that happen except by revealing to him the great restorative, Christ Jesus, the second Adam in whom he was to believe? Without faith he could not have been brought out of his fall; and without Christ revealed and preached to him, he could have no faith, since he did not know what to believe. It follows, then, that he was instructed. Just as in these last days we are taught by God’s Son and his apostles, so in those first times they were taught by God’s Spirit and his ministering angels. These were their tutors, from whom they heard the Word; and truly we are told that faith comes by hearing.