Material nature, of course, has not changed because people have not maintained the truth of their destiny. The Bible only tells us that, due to the fall of people, all creation has been subordinated to vanity (Rom. 8:20, i.e. to vain, aimless existence – meaninglessness), i.e. it has lost the rational purpose of its existence, has ceased to correspond to the rational basis of being. In its content, however, the world has undoubtedly remained the same as it was before the fall of man; and he is undoubtedly governed by the same laws which from the beginning belong to his nature as the active forces of the creative divine will. In fact, only man has changed, but he, too, has changed not in the essence of his nature, but only in the proportion of its elements. He did not lose his mind, feeling, or free will, and retained the same physical organization with which the all-wise will of God realized him in being. And yet he really became a completely different person, because his fall brought about in him that fatal contradiction between body and spirit, which, as the present law of his sinful nature, subordinated him to the physical law of sin (Rom. 7:18-23; 8:5-8; Gal. 5:17) and at the same time placed him in an abnormal relationship both to God and to the world.

Sinfulness destroyed in man that high spiritual mood which filled his life with a clear vision of God and excluded the possibility for him to be dissatisfied with nature. For sinful man, on the contrary, it was difficult to feel God's nearness, and as a result, many natural phenomena that had previously delighted him with a sense of religious rapture, now began to evoke in him a feeling of religious fear, and he naturally had to avoid what he had previously sought and desired—to avoid the opportunity to meet God in nature. And yet another, non-religious, contemplation of nature could only be the contemplation of his own position in nature, i.e., the contemplation of that true dependence on it, which he had not previously noticed and did not know. Such contemplation of nature, therefore, was bound to arouse in him a new feeling of fear, namely, physical fear, because many natural phenomena were now necessarily unpleasant or harmful to him, and consequently he naturally had to avoid these phenomena and avoid even the possibility of meeting them. Under such circumstances, it was evident that two different tasks of life arose in his mind. He had to make the fact of his fall the only one in his life, i.e., in spite of all the inevitable consequences of this fact, he had to establish such an attitude towards God that would fully correspond to God's recognition of man as a champion of truth and goodness on earth. At the same time, in view of the inevitable consequences of the fall, it was necessary for him to protect himself, i.e., to establish such an attitude towards nature that no unforeseen accidents could disturb his peaceful peace, much less threaten his existence on earth. But to combine such tasks, one of which necessarily requires a person not to look at what he needs to keep in mind about the other, means to inevitably cause in human life a fatal collision of duty and necessity.

From the point of view of his purpose in the world, man, of course, is obliged to see in himself only the free bearer of the rational spirit, and therefore he is obliged to follow his moral goal so unswervingly that no illnesses of his mortal body and even the direct danger of imminent death can suppress his moral personality. But if it really ceased to exist, then, of course, there would still be no one to fulfill its purpose in the world, which means that its destruction could in fact confirm not the truth of divine creation, but only the undoubted meaninglessness of world existence. Therefore, without in the least rejecting the religious basis of life, man can, however, justify all his concerns for the preservation of his life, and can even affirm these concerns positively as one of his moral duties. Yet this imaginary duty in reality does not arise from man's religious self-determination, but only from his knowledge of his necessary dependence on the world, and therefore it in fact determines such external activity of man as has absolutely nothing to do with his moral consciousness and cannot even be subject to any moral evaluation at all. In order to protect his life, for example, a man can kill predatory beasts that attack him, and in general he can exterminate all predatory animals dangerous to him, and he can even exterminate any and all animals, even if they can only indirectly harm him, for example, by destroying a field he has sown and threatening him with future famine. And in the same ways of preserving his life, man may need the labour-power of animals, or their wool, or their milk and flesh, and in consequence of this he can not only tame various animals useful to him, but also directly enslave them to himself to the point of autocratically disposing of their life and death. Can it be said of this activity of man that it constitutes the fulfillment of his moral duty towards himself? It is clear to everyone that it is not. Everyone understands that man is not obliged to exterminate animals and enslave them to himself, but is only compelled to do so by force of circumstances, and therefore all this cultural activity of his lies outside the sphere of the purpose given to him and characterizes only the abnormal position of man as a thing. After all, in this activity there is not and cannot be a place for religious contemplation of nature and for a moral attitude towards it.

Consequently, to give this activity religious sanction would be an obvious mistake, but at the same time to deny this activity in the name of the religious basis of life would obviously be no less a mistake, because it exists not because of man's desire to deny the truth of the religious worldview, but only because of his desire to preserve his life and avoid the involuntary sufferings of life.

It is clear that after the fall of men, when their position in the world had changed considerably, they could no longer restore in themselves the normal correlation between the thing and the person, because the direct interests of their existence irresistibly confronted them with the purely physical aims of life and inevitably subordinated their activity to the purely animal law of the struggle for existence. Under such circumstances, in order to fully harmonize life with the truth of religious and moral consciousness, people should obviously reflect in such a way that it is better for them not to exist than to exist, if only in everything that surrounds them they see the rational power of God and in everything that happens to them, they see the holy will of God. But, bearing in mind their inevitable fate, they had to think that the religious-moral attitude towards nature was of no importance to them at all, because every development of life for them could have only one end – they would die, and all their activity would be finished. It is therefore quite natural that the moral personality, who formerly knew how to subjugate the animal individual for the sake of a spiritually perfect life, could no longer subordinate it to himself, when this subordination required the complete annihilation of man. And because of this, it is quite natural that people should find themselves in the circle of the contradictions of life; Because, forced to live according to the law of physical needs, they still had to judge their lives according to the moral law of spiritual perfection. In consequence of this, they had to condemn and justify themselves at the same time, to condemn themselves for every act which was contrary to the truth of their eternal destiny, and to justify themselves in every action which was fully in accordance with their actual position in the world.

We do not know exactly how this contradiction was experienced in the thought and life of the first criminals. But the biblical history of mankind, in any case, leaves no doubt that people soon learned about the decisive impossibility for them to free themselves from this contradiction, and that this impossibility quite soon defined human life as the history of man's voluntary and involuntary sojourn in the darkness of error. According to the Book of Genesis 3:22-23, there was such an event in the life of the first man that "the Lord God said of him: Behold, Adam became as one of Us, knowing good and evil; and now lest he stretch out his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever. And the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken." This event, according to the biblical context, is not at all connected with the so-called God's judgment on people. After the Biblical account of the recognition of people as champions of good on earth, and of the promise given to them concerning the future victory over evil, and of warning them concerning labors, sickness, and death, there follows a Biblical account of the new relationship between husband and wife (Gen. 3:20), and then another second Biblical account of a remarkable event in their new life, what the Lord God did to Adam and his wife garments of skins, and clothed them (v. 21). This means that people have already managed to live for some time in new conditions of life, and, in any case, they have already managed to see the need, in order to preserve their lives, to put to death innocent animals before them. And suddenly after that they were expelled from the Garden of Eden. It is quite natural to ask the question: what caused this expulsion? Is it not God's desire to punish people for transgressing His commandment? The biblical text, in the expressions we have underlined, answers this question quite clearly. It is obvious that people were ready to forget that the Garden of Eden was only a paradise for them, and that in itself it was not a paradise at all, and that therefore, although the tree of life still continued to grow in this garden, it could no longer protect them from death; And because they were ready to forget this circumstance, they were ready to repeat their crime, i.e., they were ready to superstitiously eat the fruit of the tree of life, in order to acquire eternal life for themselves, and thus save themselves from the sad necessity of necessarily fighting with nature for their existence. In order to prevent this crime, God sent them out of the Garden of Eden and, by fear of seeing a cherubim with a flaming sword, forced them to stay away from the former tree of life (Gen. 3:24). It is clear that the contradiction between consciousness and life was deeply burdened even by the first people, and they would undoubtedly have wished to resolve this contradiction in favor of a moral attitude towards nature, but they were unable to invent any other means for the realization of this desire than an unsuccessful attempt at a new crime. As for the descendants of Adam and Eve, the biblical information directly indicates that the obvious discrepancy between the truth of religious and moral consciousness and the reality of the existing situation of people has consistently led to the complete suppression of the moral personality in people.

Of course, the children of Adam and Eve were not at all guilty of the crime of their parents, but since they were born into the world of crime, they naturally had to live the very life that exists only according to the laws of the material world, i.e. is determined only by the physical nature of life. Consequently, from the first day of their birth, they must have felt the heavy burden of physical need, and with the first awakening of conscious thought in them they must have learned the fatal necessity of struggling at all costs against want. Yielding to the force of this necessity, the eldest son of Adam completely rejected the universal goal of man and subordinated all his relations to nature and to God to the material interests of his struggle with want alone. According to the Biblical account of the first fratricide (Gen. 4:3-8), the only basis for this crime was, as is known, the unequal attitude of God to the sacrifices of Cain and Abel. By some signs that the Bible does not mention, the brothers guessed that Abel's sacrifice was accepted by God, and Cain's sacrifice was rejected, and as a result, "Cain was greatly grieved, and his face drooped." He simply had a feeling of hatred for his brother. For some time he apparently still tried to struggle with this feeling, but since the religious-moral motives in him were much weaker than the animal-egoistic instincts, then, finding himself alone with his brother in the field, he finally could not refrain from the evil act – "he rose up against Abel his brother, and killed him." This crime clearly shows that Cain was grieved, in fact, not because his gift was rejected by God, but only because his brother's gift was accepted at the same time. Consequently, the fact that he was unworthy of God did not bother him in the least, and, therefore, he offered his sacrifice to God not as a pure gift of his reverent worship before Him, but as an imaginary bribe, for which he hoped to receive a special favor from God. Otherwise, his grief would undoubtedly have been expressed only in his awareness of his spiritual imperfection, and therefore, instead of hating his brother, he would have seen in him only an example to be imitated.

After all, his moral dignity, of course, could only be enjoyed by Abel and no one else. This means that in this respect it was completely indifferent to Cain whether Abel possessed or did not possess any spiritual wealth, but if it happened that God began to help him and he became rich in material goods, then this is a completely different matter, because Cain could also use both God's help and material goods. In view of this, expecting the future material success of his brother, he hated him, and, perhaps, in view of the real successes of Abel, killed him. He killed a man who was in the same need of God's help as he was, and to whom therefore God could give His mighty help as if to his imaginary detriment; he eliminated the pretender to God's help, so that he himself would be the only contender for it.

Obviously, Cain's religious views were so far from the truth that only the decisive enslavement of the spirit to the material interests of life can to some extent explain these views in the first son of Adam. Yet these views were typical of natural human thought, because, depending on man's actual position in nature as one of the things of nature, the necessary content of man's world outlook can obviously be created only by thinking of man's necessary relations to world being, while the world of these necessary relations is in reality limited only by the world of material being. Consequently, the whole essence of the human worldview can naturally be reduced to only one simple consideration: since nature must be fought, it must be conquered. And in order to really be able to conquer it, it is necessary to know with certainty what exactly exists in the world and how it is easiest and most certain to make everything that exists a useful possession of man.

But the point is that helpless ignorance, powerless to create the idea of God, nevertheless has sufficient power to compel man to pray to God, and therefore religion in reality not only necessarily expresses the moral world view of the human person, but can also express the rational and utilitarian world view of man as a thing.

Cain created a religious attitude towards God precisely in the sense of this means, and as a result of this he no longer merely fell on the path to his true goal, but he laid the foundation for a complete falling away from God.

It goes without saying that at that remote time, when the first foundations of culture were just being laid, every step taken by man in his liberating struggle with nature undoubtedly cost him enormous efforts, and therefore there is nothing surprising in the fact that man naively extolled each of his significant successes in this field to the extent of a miracle, i.e. the product of divine power. However, such miracles were actually attributed to God only as long as man was conscious of being weak and helpless. When he felt himself sufficiently secure and could not only fight for life, but also enjoy life, all material success was for him a special kind of stage, on which he could climb only for the self-satisfied elevation of himself. Thus, for example, Cain needed God and desired to worship Him, because without the special assistance of His almighty power he did not even hope for the simple preservation of his life (Gen. 4:13-14). On the other hand, one of his immediate descendants, content with his wealth, and strong in the invention of metal tools of brass and iron, could proudly proclaim that he could defend himself seventy times better than Almighty God could have done for him, v. 19-24, cf. 15. In this boastful statement of the self-righteous Lamech there is evidently a direct mockery of man's faith in God and of the truth of religious service to God. Obviously, to the extent that people ceased to need God, they no longer wanted to think about Him, because they had no moral relationship to Him. And the Biblical information really reveals to us "the great corruption of men on earth" (Gen. 6:5). There was a time when people stopped thinking about their purpose in the world. They disdainfully rejected the religious and moral tasks of life and reduced all their vital interests only to physical contentment, to the desire for coarse pleasures and to the free satisfaction of these desires; so that, according to the Biblical expression (Gen. 6:3), they were flesh, and there was absolutely nothing in them that could point to the truth of their descent from the all-wise and all-perfect God. According to the Biblical account, at that time in the entire human race there was only one family that had not yet had time to submit to the instincts of animal existence and could still disturb people a little more by reminding them of God (Gen. 6:8-10). But even this one family would undoubtedly have perished in the waves of general corruption, unless, as the Bible asserts, God Himself had not intervened in the history of mankind and washed the defiled earth with the waves of the flood, in which everything perished that lived in vain and that threatened even to destroy God's work in the world.

According to the Biblical account, God saved only the righteous family of Noah from destruction, and even this only family He saved only conditionally. God only freed Noah's family from the harmful influence of depraved people, and even God Himself could not take it out of the world of contradictions or restore for it the normal conditions of primitive life of people, because Noah was not the conqueror of evil, but on the contrary – the conqueror of evil, and therefore the salvation of his family, thanks to the external assistance of divine omnipotence, in view of the obvious senselessness of the entire history of mankind from the time of Adam to the Flood, it would be absolutely correct to condemn God's truth and love as an obvious injustice and obvious ill-will towards all lost humanity. For by relying on His omnipotence, God could certainly have prevented the fall of the first people, but He did not want to suppress their freedom, because it was not for Him to disfigure His own image in people, and after the fall of the first people, He could certainly have taken away all Adam's children and, immediately after their birth, put them in the same conditions of life. in which Adam was before his fall; but He did not want to allow the man He created to be really created in vain, and that even in His remote descendant He would not conquer the evil which He allowed to triumph over Him.

Meanwhile, Noah did not overcome evil any more than all the other righteous men who had walked with God before him and struggled with evil and departed from the world without seeing salvation. In view of this, it is quite understandable that God revealed His salvation to Noah precisely in the sense of freeing him from the corrupting influences of the environment, because He undoubtedly saved not Noah personally and his family, but people in general, that is, He generally saved His eternal thought about man.