Being placed at the very commencement of his course, intended to be progressive, he would require indeed to be supplied at once with the needful amount of knowledge; and as he was created with the full use of his bodily senses without passing through the stage of infancy, so doubtless he was created in the full possession of his intellectual powers, and probably knew, by something like intuition, just so much as would enable him to move forward from that starting point, under the usual laws of intellectual existence. But it is not God's wont to over-endow any creature, nor so to impart knowledge as to supersede the necessity for the creature's very best efforts. Just enough, and no more than enough, of endowment for human beings beginning their career, is what commends itself to our judgment as most desirable, and most in harmony with the principles on which the all-wise God seems to us to proceed. And if we think of the human race in its entireness, study the history of humanity as a whole, we find that, speaking generally, there has been progress.

We may suppose Adam to have been created perhaps in the beauty and vigor of early manhood, and to have awoke out of nothingness somewhat as we awake out of sleep, with just so much of knowledge as was needed for the circumstances in which he was placed, but not more; more he must acquire by the exercise of his powers, with such oral communications as his Creator might see fit to make.

To suppose more than this would be quite arbitrary on our parts. We have no right to assume for instance that Adam was by intuition an astronomer, beside whom the Herschells of the present day are children; or that he knew of the earth's roundness, or could read its earlier history as geologists do now, on the rough and flinty faces of the rocks; or recognised the value of mathematical lines and curves, or understood intuitively the various laws of nature. For while we have no warrant for it, everything concurs to discountenance the notion.

We may, generally speaking, take men's ideas of God as a pretty good criterion of their intellectual status; more especially if they have not been subjected to a long operation of debasing influences. And if we could ascertain the amount of our first parents' knowledge of God, we should have a standard by which to take their intellectual stature. We ask then did God, as often

afterwards in patriarchal times, assume a visible form in order to instruct the new-born intelligences? The circumstances of the case, joined with the fact of such appearances subsequently, would lead us to believe so, while some of the intimations in the Mosaic narrative would plainly teach the notion. Adam seems to have seen in vision during sleep the process of the creation of Eve; the narrated circumstances of which would necessitate the idea of a visible form. And he sought to hide himself from the presence of the Lord; which may again convince us of the fact. But if so, how incipient, how puerile almost, comparatively, must be the ideas formed of a God whose shape is seen by the eye. When for instance in later times Abraham conversed with the Lord in human form, with the angel Jehovah,* who condescended to accept of the hospitality of his tent; or Jacob wrestled the livelong night with the mysterious stranger, of whom at the close he said I have seen God face to face;† how can we suppose those

* Gen. xviii. 1—8. And the Lord appeared to him in the plains of Mamre: and he sat in the tent door in the heat of the day; and he lift up his eyes and looked, and lo, three men stood by him; and when he saw them, he went to meet them from the tent door, and bowed himself toward the ground, and said, My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight, pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant; let a little water, I pray you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. And I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; and after that you shall pass on: for therefore are ye come to your servant. And they said, So do as thou hast said. And Abraham hastened into the tent unto Sarah, and said, Make ready quickly three measures of fine meal, knead it, and make cakes upon the hearth. And Abraham ran unto the herd, and fetched a calf tender and good, and gave it to a young man: and he hasted to dress it. And he took butter, and milk, and the calf which he had dressed, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree: and they did eat.'

† Genesis xxxii. 24-30. 'And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. And when he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint, as he wrestled with him. And he said let me go for the day breaketh; and he said I will not let thee go, except thou bless me. And he said unto him, What is thy name? and he said, Jacob. And he said, Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel; for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed. And Jacob asked him, and said, Tell me I pray thee, thy name; and he said, Wherefore is it, that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there. And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel; for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved !'

patriarchs, honored as are their names for ever, to have those loftier conceptions of the Divine Being which, from a larger acquaintance with the magnificence of the universe, from the corrections which science has supplied, and above all from the more elevated writings of later prophets and apostles, and especially from the instructions of Christ himself, it is our privilege to acquire?

In teaching children about God, we of course begin with such ideas as their little minds can receive; and if they grow up pious and thoughtful, and are favorably situated, they rise in their conceptions of God higher and higher as long as they live. It is so with ourselves. In childhood we conceived a bright and glorious form sitting august on a lofty throne, surrounded with obedient and swift-winged servants; and we have been ever since gradually correcting our early ideas, and acquiring loftier and still loftier views of the Infinite Spirit, who is from everlasting to everlasting, the author and sustainer of all existence. But what pious and intelligent english youth of the nineteenth century has not higher views of God than patriarchs would necessarily form, having seen the object of their worship in the human shape, and stood by while he partook of the hastily dressed meal?

Thus then was it with the earliest individuals of our race, in the earliest period of their existence. And that we are correct is pretty clearly evidenced by the fact of their almost amazing simplicity, in thinking they could conceal themselves from his view, if they cowered behind a tree! 'And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.' The child of intelligent parents among us that has not past his tenth year, has acquired correcter ideas of God than this indicates. Why they could not have known that God is a spirit, to whom all things are ever present. Nor will it do to reply that the sin they had just committed immediately caused a wonderful obscuration of their intellect. For if the understanding became suddenly darkened, this would happen either naturally, as the inevitable consequence of sin, or by immediate interference. But we have no hint of God's having I at once interposed to darken and distort on their minds, the image of himself, nor yet is it credible that he should so act. Neither is it the natural tendency of an act of disobe dience, however heinous, to deprive a man instantly of the

knowledge he had possessed immediately before. A long course of hardened sin and degrading vice, indeed, will cloud our perceptions of 'the beauty of the Lord our God,' incapacitate us to enjoy communion with him, and prompt to unworthy ideas. But no one day's sinfulness, nor indeed a whole life of sin, would sink an intelligent english christian, who should thus miserably fall from a state of holiness, from his elevated ideas of the Infinite Jehovah into such notions as pagans form,—would not transform a Howe or a Foster into a Hottentot! Has the Prince of the power of the air lost his knowledge of the Divine Being by the natural operation of his long-continued apostacy? Why if to blot out of the memory knowledge that was previously there, be the natural operation of transgression, then would all knowledge, especially of God, gradually ebb out of sinful

minds.

The ideas then that Adam had of the Divine Being immediately after his sin, were in harmony with those he had previously formed; and thus we have the desired standard whereby to take his intellectual proportions, which, in connection with all the circumstances of the case, forbid our imagining him in the first days of his existence, while fresh with the dew of his youth, likely or indeed able to deduce from the simple phrase Thou shalt die, all that divines five or six thousand years afterward, in the plenitude of their theological might, are skillful enough to excogitate therefrom.

Let it be remembered that, as we have no reason to suppose him skilled in the physical sciences, while his ideas of God were manifestly and almost necessarily very puerile, we may be quite sure he was still less skilled in pneumatology, and was little enough of a metaphysician. If he believed himself destined to an endless existence, endowed with an immortality that could not be alineated, it must have been, either, because it was revealed to him (of which, all-important and decisive as it would be, as there is no intimation so we may not suppose it) or, because he had reasoned out the fact for himself; which for many reasons it is submitted he was incompetent to do.

When then I am gravely assured that the death threatened to Adam included, as divines say, "death spiritual, death temporal, and death eternal," in addition to all other objections, I reply that it surpasses my power to believe that he to whom it was threatened could so have understood

't, unless it were explained to him to mean so, which not being intimated, is not to be assumed.

There is nothing indeed on which it more behoves, or in fact so much behoves, that there should be perfect and transparent explicitness, as in a sentence denouncing evil in case of transgression. One who is in any danger of violating law, ought to be able by due pains-taking to understand the threatened consequences of voluntary ill-doing. It would not be righteous in a human lawgiver to threaten ten stripes and inflict a thousand, or to threaten a day's imprisonment and then commit to the galleys for life, or hand over to the grim executioner. This, amongst men, would be properly denounced as most flagrant tyranny. Let the man whom it is wished to deter from a criminal act know explicitly the full legal consequences of crime. Yet not to lay any stress at this point on what nevertheless appears a forcible objection against the idea of endless torment as the proper punishment of sin, namely, that it cannot be made level to the apprehension of the creature whom it is intended to warn thereby-it does not appear to me that Adam could possibly have understood the threatening as intending what the orthodox make it to mean,-misery here, separation by a painful process of body and soul, intermediate state of terrible suspense and awful suffering, resurrection of the body and reunion of the spirit in order to increased torment, which should last for ever!

I repeat, I cannot see how the simple assertion—Dying thou shalt die, can bear this infinite weight so fondly put upon it. When God speaks, he surely speaks to be understood, in order that those whom he addresses may know something. Is it any part of wisdom to pronounce words that no one can comprehend the real meaning of, or which seem to mean one thing, but in reality mean quite another, and that the very opposite, and even infinitely more dreadful? How was Adam to understand that death meant life, -endless life-endless life in torment?

On the contrary, the very words would seem to shut us up to the idea that utter destruction, cessation of existence, return to that nothingness out of which the divine power had called him, was the death threatened to our first father in case of transgression. An interpretation which is not only the most natural in itself, considering all the circumstances, but to which we are additionally impelled by the