as a first-made being of the human species could be; but what Adam was none of his posterity could be.

:

For as to them it was made the law, which has never altered, that they should be born in a baby state, and therefore totally ignorant of all things; feeble, helpless, and with all parts of their body only a portion of their intended size. No infant is in any respect a complete or perfect human being either in frame or intellect and all mankind being appointed to be born as babes, none were meant to be perfect at their birth; but all come into life on the principle that they shall be improvable into what they ought to be, as far as they are able to advance in their worldly life, and under the circumstances which would individually accompany it.

The consequence of this unvaried law as to our nativity is, that every one is born, and now as much as all were 4000 years ago, an imperfect being-imperfect in all respects when they begin their human life, but continuously improvable from the first moment they breathe and see. They are meant to acquire all that they are deficient in at their nativity as soon and as largely as their country, era, and surrounding society, education, custom, and means of self-formation allow.

Improvability is therefore the law and designation of our created nature; and to improve is its perpetual tendency, and should be regarded as its perpetual duty; for it was manifestly made improvable, in order that it might improve. It was born incomplete with the express purpose that, as it lived, it should gradually attain the completion of what it was capable of. The full formation of our body and limbs our Creator has taken into his own care, and, by the plan and law of our frame, has always secured the performance of that effect. Under these the body grows of itself, without our agency or consciousness, into what it is to be for its tempo¬ rary earthly life.

But the improvement and completion of our mind or soul he has put into our own power, and required us to attend to and promote it. In this he only aids, and provides the means and materials for us to make use of, but he leaves it to ourselves to seek and apply them, and to acquire the additional qualities and excellences which we ought to possess. Revelation teaches and urges us to attain the largest portion of them that the position of our social life admits of; and also to make the required improvement the principle, the aim, the

leading habit of our lives. It intimates that, in proportion to the degree of attainable completeness with which we die, his future favours will be administered to us.

But what are the improvements which we have to acquire, and what are the aids which he supplies to us in the attainment, and what are the means and materials of improvement which he has provided for us?

Born in total ignorance of all things, we clearly have to acquire the knowledge of all that we ought to know. Born atheists from that ignorance, we have to learn his existence and relations to us, and all that he has communicated concerning himself, his creations, our fellow-creatures, and ourselves, and the counsels and commands which he has expressed on all these subjects. Born with quick sensibilities, we have to train these to the right moral feelings. Excitable by everything and to everything, and with limbs capable of every kind of motion and action, we have to perceive how we ought to use all our faculties and powers, to what we should direct and apply them, and from what we should restrain them. We have to learn all the rules and attain all the habits of selfregulation throughout our whole earthly life, so that, as each occasion arises, we may not do to others or to ourselves what will be injurious or offensive, and that we may do in every circumstance what we ought.

Our own well-being is put into our own care, as well as the welfare of those with whom we may be socially connected; and we have to learn to know what we ought to do or avoid for our own sakes, as likewise to live friendly or in peace with others. We are born with a fine intellectual capacity; but which at first is vague, unformed, and general power; and we have to form and exercise this into correct observation and perception, just reasoning, and right judgment. We come into the world without any opinions at all, and we have to acquire right opinions on all things of which we shall become conscious, and on which we shall have to think and act. We have all these things to learn, and to learn for ourselves in the best way we can, from teachers, from example, from customs, and precepts; by observation, imitation, comparison, reading, thinking, judging, and acting, until we become spontaneously, and in our instructed and improved nature, and by practised habit, and by immediate and voluntary self-government, all that we ought to be, do all that we ought at every time

to do, and know all that we ought to know, in order to have the continual rectitude of mind, feeling, desire, will, and conduct.

Now, as every child has to learn and to acquire all these improvements in our present families, so had every one of the generations which have preceded us upon our common earth. If they had made their full measure of these improvements, we should have come into a rich inheritance of them. But they have left so large a proportion of them unattained, that human nature is still full of deficiencies, which it is advancing onward to supply, and which every individual now living has to lessen in himself, as far as he may have the opportunity or the ability.

But the chief basis of all these in every age is knowledge -that knowledge which we all ought personally to acquire; because without it we can never be, or think, or act as we should do. Just as the child cannot act or judge properly without it, neither can the man.

In proportion as any are deficient in what they ought to know, they are so far still in their baby state. They have their born ignorance and darkness about them, and must think and act correspondently with that destitution.

But this knowledge must, like every other improvement, be a gradual acquisition: what is most immediately essential should be first attained; what becomes necessary in due succession afterward should be sought for in the proper course and order; and if this were regularly and fitly done, and the actions made conformable to the progress, the human mind would grow up steadily to all its required qualities and excellences, as the body does under the guardian and guiding laws which form it, and as the stately tree advances with uninterrupted certainty and expanding efficiency; never vacillating or inconsistent, but reaching in due time its ordained perfection, and retaining it unchanged as long as it is its settled nature to last.

But who must be the first teacher, and what the first knowledge to acquire? In our late epocha of the world, we have streams of knowledge of all sorts flowing about us and to us in ten thousand currents, and bringing with them all sorts of things, good and bad, the workmanship or effusions of our predecessors and of ourselves. The primeval ages had none of this. They had everything to find out or learn, and they could have no instructer but nature, which is passive and

dumb, and was always to be observed, studied, interpreted, and understood; and THEIR CREATOR, who began to teach and meant to teach them, but from whom mankind so early turned, and with such determined and persisting alienation, that from him they would learn nothing. This compelled him to choose his own means and process for their improvement and benefit against their will; and to lead human nature, notwithstanding its aversion to the teacher, to the progressive and ulterior completeness which he meant it to attain. To these means and process let us now direct our thoughts.

LETTER XXXIX.

A Delineation of that Part of the Divine Process which was comprised in the Formation, Establishment, and Instruction of the Jewish Nation.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

The process adopted by the Deity for the benefit of his human race, after their defection and alienation from him, is displayed to us in the Hebrew Scriptures, from the account of his address to Abraham to the last enunciation of his will and purposes by the prophet Malachi.

The Divine communications to mankind closed with this prophecy in that period of the world, and no further Divine interposition or supernatural agency was perceptibly exerted on our earth until the appointed time of our Saviour's birth approached.

A new series of Divine agency then commenced, which the Christian Scriptures narrate to us. They disclose a new and extended process of the Divine wisdom as then put in action, which has since been in constant intellectual operation, and under whose continued agency we are now living. We see not the directing hand nor the influencing power by our material organs of vision. But the mind that duly studies the effects which arise may trace and discern them, and will find daily delight in contemplating their widely-augmenting efficiency.

The scheme of the process was to select one individual from the revolting world, and to train him and his immediate descendants into a full and intimate knowledge of the Deity as a personal God; interested with his human world, desirous to teach and determined to superintend and govern it; and, by a series of incidents in their own biographies, to make them sensorially acquainted with their Creator, with the principles on which he should govern human life, and with the rules, and ideas, and feelings on which he required them to act towards him and towards each other. From the family thus instructed he planned to raise a nation with whom he should deal, and whom he should continue to teach and guide in the same immediate manner; and, in the various events which would occur in their national and individual conduct, to make such successive manifestations of himself, of his power and agency, of his mind and will, of his plans and purposes, of his counsels and precepts, and of his general and particular government of the world, as would infuse into the human mind, by due degrees, a true knowledge of him, and right ideas and feelings concerning him. By these the moral intellectual formation of human nature would be gradually advanced, at first in Judea, and afterward in the rest of the world, by the consequences that would follow, as these transactions and revelations became known elsewhere, and as further operations of the Divine agency in the world should introduce further knowledge and larger effects. Thus the truths which the rest of mankind were persistingly refusing would be gradually brought to them through this peculiar channel, to be enjoyed by all when they should, in the course of time, become willing and more fit to receive it.

Abraham was the person selected to be the subject of the commencement of this grand process. He was separated from his kinsfolk and fellow-citizens in order to live at a distance from them, and was informed by the Deity that his posterity should be raised into a great nation.* A momentous appendage was annexed, that all mankind would receive a peculiar bles

* The Lord said unto Abraham, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee." This was the command. The consequence and reward of his obedience to it was then added: "And I will make of thee a great nation: and I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing."-Gen. xii., v. 1, 2.