There are some peculiarities in the present state of human nature, which strongly refer to

Eden that were in the garden of God envied him.” (xxxi. 9.) “The land that was desolate is become like the garden of Eden." (xxxvi. 35.) Joel, in the well-known and magnificent description of the career of the invading army, strengthens his highest contrast of beauty and desolation by its memory: land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them as a howling wilderness." (ii. 3).

"The

The tree of life is no less an object of frequent reference. "The fruit of the righteous is a tree of life. When the desire cometh, it is a tree of life." (Prov. xi. &c.) And in the Apocalypse, the greatest of all the prophecies, and which contains the fates of the final ages, it is declared, "To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God." (Rev. ii. 7.) "In the midst of the street of it, and of either side of the river, was there the tree of life." (xxii. 2.) The general allusions to the history are also of the most decisive order. Our Lord, in renewing the original validity of marriage, says, "Have ye not read, that he which made them in the beginning made them male and female; for this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh." (Matt. xix. 4, 5.) St. Paul repeatedly alludes to the history. "The God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly." Rom. xvi. 20.) "As the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself took part of the same, that through death he might destroy him that hath the power of death, that is the devil." (Heb. ii. 14.) "He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning: the Son of God was manifested for this purpose, that he might destroy the works of the devil." (1 John iii. 8.) "In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God." (10): with many others.

the original fall, and which are to be accounted for on no other grounds.

Man is the only animal which obtains a subsistence, often a difficult and scanty one, by the labour of the ground; the only animal to whom toil is necessary a fact altogether the reverse of what might have been expected from his natural superiority over the brute, and from the range open to his intellectual powers.

Woman is the only female which undergoes severe pain in parturition-a circumstance contrary to the whole analogy of nature, which reserves pain for accidental injuries or violations of its order.

Woman is the only female subject to the authority of her fellow-creature-a submission which once nearly amounted to slavery, but in which Christianity has extinguished the old inequality, while it has left the dependence.

The connection of clothing with the avoidance of shame, is inexplicable but by the Mosaic history. No nation, however savage, or dwelling in climates whose heat might seem to interdict all clothing, has been found, which does not adopt a certain degree of clothing, and that from an acknowledged sense of shame. This is not to be accounted for on any natural principle.

CHAPTER X.

THE FLAME OF THE CHERUBIM.

UNDER the sentence of expulsion, our first parents were now sent into the wilderness. The gentle occupation of their former lives, the dressing and keeping the trees of Paradise, was to be exchanged for the severe labours of the field. The spontaneous luxuriance of the garden was to be followed by the harsh and scanty produce wrung by the sweat of the brow from a soil cursed with sterility. This signal change must have been felt as strong evidence of the Divine displeasure; and yet it may have been but a new form of the Divine mercy. Man had placed himself under circumstances which rendered a continual sense of his crime essential to his restoration. He was

sent" to till the ground from which he was taken"-language which seems to imply that the moral of his death was to be impressed on him by the constant occupation of his existence. But labour had also become the safest guardian of his intelligence, his hope, and his virtue.

In all lands where the earth throws out unsolicited abundance, the powers and principles of the human mind either stagnate or take fire; life fluctuates between gross indulgence and dreary inaction, and man degenerates into the savage.

If it be objected that this evil was to have been equally dreaded in the spontaneous fertility of Paradise, the sufficient answer is; that the necessity for labour arose from the necessity for discipline, and that necessity from sin.-That, if to a being of unclouded reason and unperverted passions, occupation could be important as the sustenance of virtue; the activity of the mind might supply occupation, of a much more animating and more exalted order than the labour of the hands; and that, with God for his visible guide, angels for his companions, and the wonders of the spiritual world throwing their light on the wonders of the material, full and matchless employment lay before the faculties of man.

But he was not left to this gradual lesson. A direct interposition—a visible and perpetual testimony of his early happiness, his fall, and his expulsion; the fiery pillar, that in after ages was to burn above the march of Israel; the glory, that was to shine between the cherubim of the Temple, now covered the gate of Paradise; an unapproachable flame, "to keep the way to the tree of life." Yet, fearful as this emblem was, it bore the characteristic of all the Divine interpositions :

under the semblance of terror it was mercy. The seizure of premature immortality by man might obviously have been precluded in various ways. The tree of life might have been withered, as the fig-tree was at the gates of Jerusalem; or the garden might have perished by the natural results of neglect within the generation; or both might have been stricken with the common sterility of the world. But thus man would have lost a memorial, of the highest value to his surviving virtue. In ages of rudeness, with the daily labour for the daily bread forcing all the faculties into the direction of the wants, appeals to the senses must be the chief mode of impressing the heart. If the first man, even in the long lapse of his almost thousand years, with the perpetual anxieties of life, and the growing infirmities of age clouding his perception, was to be supposed incapable of ever forgetting his early happiness and fatal fall; still, to his descendants all must have come with the increasing weakness of tradition. But in front of Paradise flamed the perpetual attestation of his history. With what irresistible impression must he not have told that history, as he pointed to the "eastern gate," which neither the power of man could force, nor even the audacity of man dare to come nigh. How perfectly natural is it to conceive the mingling sorrow and holy hope which might have filled those generations of exile, when on their sabbaths they gathered