the threefold agency of nature, of other men, and of God.1 By virtue of the image of God which he bears, he is lord of irrational nature; elements, plants, animals, are his servants, and do his will while that will is conformed to the laws of their being; by the soil, he is sustained and nourished; water quenches his thirst, the air enables him to breathe; all nature is employed in satisfying his wants, in developing the faculties of his soul, and, by speaking to him unceasingly of God, in strengthening the religious life in his spirit. He is the equal of his fellow men, with whom he is connected by the ties of love, and his faculties can be perfectly developed only in the bosom of the family, and in legitimate social and political relations. In infancy and childhood he grows up under the moral influence of parents who watch over and guide him; as a husband, he finds in the love and the life of woman what was wanting to the perfection of his own separate understanding and working; and he passes his life in the quickening atmosphere of affection, virtue, truth, and piety. He is the servant of God; but the believing and rejoicing servant of a God of love, who formed him after his own image; and so the spirit has its atmosphere, which the Sun of Righteousness warms and enlightens, and in which man lives by faith.

Such is man in his idea; such he was before the fall, such he will one day again become.

3. Man Fallen.

The first man sinned, and the very source of our life became poisoned.

By sin man lost his union with God; and, as a plant which has its light, warmth and life only from the sun, and yet should wander out into void space far from its true orbit, and lose itself in icy darkness, his spiritual eye is darkened so that he can no longer see God, his soul has become enfeebled, and his spiritual death has brought on the death of the body. Man has become his own centre, his own sun; he refers everything to himself; he has broken, by self-seeking, the cords of love that should bind him to the rest of the world; and, as he no longer receives spiritual strength and support from God, he has so corrupted himself 1 See Heinroth, Anthropologie, 2nd part; and Görres, Gliederung und Zeiterfolge der Weltgeschichte.

as to have become incapable, without help, of any good thing. This being, who bears the image of God, and in whom God would perfect that Divine likeness, having in his pride sought, by making himself independent, to become equal with God, has, instead, become self-enslaved; he has in his heart a mastersin - by whom his legitimate sovereign was dethroned; and his servitude is so much the more deplorable and bitter because he still retains, in a certain degree, a consciousness of moral obligation that he struggles in vain to fulfil, and a desire of happiness that he cannot attain.

By sin, man has come to a painful knowledge of the holiness and justice of God, which are as far beyond our comprehension as his love. He feels that the Lord is angry with him, and that the wages of sin is death. He looks around him for a life to be sacrificed instead of his own, and deluges the altars he erects with the blood of slain beasts, and sometimes even with that of a brother man or a child. Or, on the other hand, he hardens his heart; he says to himself, that sin is an imperfection inherent in his nature; he stifles the voice of conscience, and forgets both his Heavenly Father who still loves him, and his Judge who must one day condemn him.

Man becomes the tyrant or the slave of man; he finds in those around him the same hatred or coldness, the same vices or mere show of virtues, the same ignorance or falsehood, the same impiety or forgetfulness of God, which he carries in his own bosom.

His dominion over all created things he has lost; beasts of the earth fear (Gen. 4: 2) but are not subject to him (Gen. 1: 28), with the exception of a few species which he has appropriated, and which minister to his wants. Nature finds in him no longer anything but an enemy who torments her, a heedless creature who despises her admonitions, or a slave whom she oppresses. She is not, as Zoroaster and Manes taught, the joint work of a good and an evil Principle; she is pure as the God who created her. If she acts injuriously upon man, it is because man has lost that Divine life which assured to him dominion over all the earth; it is because there burn within him lawless desires that change the most healthful fruits into poisons; the riches of nature become food for his various passions, and he goes about to worship her as if she were herself the God of whom she is but a revelation.

Besides, man hath drawn down with him in his fall that nature which was appointed to surround him with its pomp and glory; the evil that has found place in his soul affects also the earth, and the earth is cursed for his sake. The primitive order has, therefore, been disturbed even in the sphere of physical cause and effect; nature has received, that she may execute, the Divine judgments, a destructive power that was not hers before sin came; in some regions she is enchained by eternal frosts, in others, sterile from dryness and heat, and in others still, perhaps, gigantic in her productions through the very excess of fertility. Had man retained his primitive condition, physical evil would have been as if it were not, for to the pure all things are pure; but man having fallen, nature has rendered his fall still more desperate and made his sin still more sin, by exercising over him an influence not only very great, but dangerous, sad, deadly.

Evil, as it cannot proceed from a holy God, is necessarily the work of created beings, and theirs only. It existed before man; and Adam was tempted from without. To the temptation urged by the very author of evil, the father of lies, he yielded. So also it is only by means out of himself that he may be delivered from sin, into which weakness, still more than evil propensity, originally caused him to fall. We arrive here at a truth, the reality of which no unbelief of ours can affect; we say that man, in quitting the realm of light, entered that of darkness; that, in excluding God from his soul, he opened it to the devil; and that nature and humanity became subject together to the prince of this world.

What, O God, had been the fate of the earth, if with thy mighty hand thou hadst not traced for evil bounds that it could not pass, and if in thine ineffable love thou hadst not sent thy Son into the world to destroy the works of the devil! Evil might pollute, but could not annihilate, a creature of God; might cause perturbations in the universe, but the primitive order it could not destroy. On the contrary, God causes it entirely to disappear where inen, by a strange madness and in their permit. ted freedom, do not oppose themselves directly to his will. His wisdom is able to educe good out of evil, a greater good than would have had place but for the existence of sin; sin notwithstanding, and even by reason of its existence, the earth moves on towards a consummation of infinitely higher glory than that of its original purity and beauty.

4. Origin of Races.

In Adam was the germ of the whole human family, and from him, after a hundred and fifty generations, have descended the eight or nine millions of men who now dwell on the earth. But in all ages and in all regions, the innumerable dwellers on our planet have had each his own proper individuality, which has never been an exact repetition of any other.

Individuality is a certain combination of the constituent parts of a being. Man is an exceedingly complex being, and embraces within himself a world of invisible things that rivals in various riches the world of nature. The elements that belong to him may, therefore, be combined in the individual, in infinitely varied proportions. In one, the soul predominates; in another, the body; in a third, the spirit; here, it is the nervous system that rules; there, the arterial; here, the affections; there, the understanding; and so on.

In the first man these elements must necessarily have existed in perfect equilibrium; among his descendants they are developed variously. But the laws and the causes that determine the peculiar combinations that are found in this and that individual, are unknown to us; for individuality is a mystery of life, and act of creation.

The soul, in our conceptions at least, if not actually in time, precedes the body, which is its visible form, even as God precedes the material universe that he hath created. As is the soul, so is the body; and the distinctive character of each soul manifests itself in the whole physical organization, especially in the form of the head, and in the physiognomy. The infinite diversity of forms found among human beings is, therefore, a result of that individuality which is a fact in morals as well as in physics.

The influence of nature, that of the family and of society, and that which each exercises over himself by his manners and habits, are but of secondary importance, and can only strengthen, enfeeble or modify the original fact of a given individuality. Yet by constant and unvarying repetition through a long series of generations, very evident changes may be brought about.

Meantime sin, in its work of disturbance, exaggerates or destroys individual differences. Sometimes an excessive predominance is given to this or that faculty, so that it overshadows

all the others; sometimes, assimilating man to the brute, it gives to all the individuals of a race a physiognomy that varies but little. But above all, it destroys the proper supremacy of the soul over the body, develops unworthy passions, and tends to efface, from body and soul alike, the image of God in man, who, in his brutishness, descends lower than animals destitute of reason. Now, as every disposition of the soul manifests itself in the body, it results that the human race embraces families, and the same nation, individuals, who differ exceedingly in personal appearance, and among whom some are as remarkable for beauty as others are for ugliness.

5. Gradual Degeneration of Man and Nature.

Sin by no means produced all its physical effects immediately after the fall. Nature, whose root the destroying worm had, indeed, attacked, still retained numerous traces of her original beauty. It was only after continuing eight or nine hundred years that the onset made by death upon a being naturally immortal, ended in separating the soul from the body. And with this extraordinary vital power in man, there were doubtless faculties of corresponding vigor and energy, such as it is now difficult for us to conceive. But all these privileges enjoyed by the antediluvians beyond what we possess, did but hasten their moral ruin.

They were divided, according to family relationships and to the spirit which animated them respectively, into Sethites, who worshipped God, and Cainites, who were abandoned to magic and to all evil. The Sethites, it is believed, invented the art of writing and cultivated astronomy; the Cainites built cities or dwelt in tents, giving themselves up in both to the luxuries and indulgences of civilized life. They formed but one people, all spake the same language, and were not organized into different states and nations; so that sin was not kept within bounds by the strong arm of civil law, nor its propagation hindered by differences of language. God, moreover, designing to convince man of the depth of his corruption, abandoned him apparently to himself; and the Saviour promised to Adam did not appear. The result was, that the Sethites were seduced from their purer worship and practice by the Cainites, and the whole world became filled with violence; the thoughts of the hearts of the