"We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: out of the tree in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." Thus far she appears to have been clear of blame. But how long did she continue so?" And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." (Verses 4, 5.) Here sin began: namely, unbelief. "The woman was deceived," says the apostle. She believed a lie: she gave more credit to the word of the devil than to the word of God. And unbelief brought forth actual sin: "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and pleasant to the eyes, and to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit, and did eat;" and so completed her sin. But "the man," as the apostle observes, (( was not deceived." How then, came he to join in the transgression? "She gave unto her husband, and he did eat." He sinned with his eyes open. He rebelled against his Creator, as is highly probable,

"Not by stronger reason moved,

But fondly overcome with female charms."

And if this was the case, there is no absurdity in the assertion of a great man, "that Adam sinned in his heart before he sinned outwardly; before he ate of the forbidden fruit;" namely, by inward idolatry, by loving the creature more than the Creator.

2. Immediately, pain followed sin. When he lost his innocence, he lost his happiness. He painfully feared that God, in the love of whom his supreme happiness before consisted. "He said," (verse 10,) "I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid." He fled from Him, who was, till then, his desire and glory and joy. He "hid himself from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden." Hid himself! What! from the all-secing eye? the eye which, with one glance, pervades heaven and earth? See how his understanding

likewise was impaired! What amazing folly was this! such as one would imagine very few, even of his posterity, could have fallen into. So dreadfully was his "foolish heart darkened" by sin, and guilt, and sorrow, and fear. His innocence was lost, and, at the same time, his happiness and his wisdom. Here is the clear, intelligible answer to that question, "How came evil into the world?"

3. One cannot but observe, throughout this whole narration, the inexpressible tenderness and lenity of the almighty Creator, from whom they had revolted, the Sovereign against whom they had rebelled. "And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?"-thus graciously calling him to return, who would otherwise have eternally fled from God. "And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked." Still here is no acknowledgment of his fault, no humiliation for it. But with what astonishing tenderness does God lead him to make that acknowledgment! "And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked?" How camest thou to make this discovery? "Hast thou eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" "And the man said," still unhumbled, yea, indirectly throwing the blame upon God himself, “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.' "And the Lord God," still in order to bring them to repentance, "said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done?" (Verse 13.) "And the woman said," nakedly declaring the thing as

it was, "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." "And the Lord God said unto the serpent," to testify his utter abhorrence of sin, by a lasting monument of his displeasure, in punishing the creature that had been barely the instrument of it, "Thou art cursed above the cattle, and above every beast of the field. And I will pat enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed: it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." Thus, in the midst of

judgment hath God remembered mercy, from the be ginning of the world; connecting the grand promise of salvation with the very sentence of condemnation!

"

4. Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and" (or in) "thy conception: in sorrow' (or pain) "thou shalt bring forth children;"yea, above any other creature under heaven; which original curse we see is entailed on her latest posterity. "And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." It seems, the latter part of this sentence is explanatory of the former. Was there, till now, any other inferiority of the woman to the man than that which we may conceive in one angel to another? "And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth unto thee"-useless, yea, and hurtful productions; whereas, nothing calculated to hurt or give pain had, at first, any place in the creation. "And thou shalt eat the herb of the field :". -coarse and vile, compared to the delicious fruits of paradise! "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground: for out of it wast thou taken for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

II. 1. Let us now, in the second place, weigh these solemn words in a more particular manner. "Dust thou art" but how fearfully and wonderfully wrought into innumerable fibres, nerves, membranes, muscles, arteries, veins, vessels of various kinds! And how amazingly is this dust connected with water, with enclosed, circulating fluids, diversified a thousand ways by a thousand tubes and strainers! Yea, and how wonderfully is air impacted into every part, solid or fluid, of the animal machine; air, not elastic, which would tear the machine in pieces, but as xed as water under the pole! But all this would not avail, were not ethereal fire intimately mixed both with this earth, air,

and water. And all these elements are mingled together in the most exact proportion; so that while the body is in health, no one of them predominates, in the least degree, over the others.

2. Such was man, with regard to his corporeal part, as he came out of the hands of his Maker. But since he sinned, he is not only dust, but mortal, corruptible dust. And by sad experience we find, that this " corruptible body presses down the soul." It very frequently hinders the soul in its operations; and, at best, serves it very imperfectly. Yet the soul cannot dispense with its service, imperfect as it is: for an imbodied spirit cannot form one thought but by the mediation of its bodily organs. For thinking is not, as many suppose, the act of a pure spirit; but the act of a spirit connected with a body, and playing upon a set of material keys. It cannot possibly, therefore, make any better music than the nature and state of its instruments allow it. Hence, every disorder of the body, especially of the parts more immediately subservient to thinking, lays an almost insuperable bar in the way of its thinking justly. Hence the maxim received in all ages, Humanum est errare et nescire," Not ignorance alone," (that belongs, more or less, to every creature in heaven and earth; seeing none is omniscient, none knoweth all things save the Creator,) "but error is entailed on child of man.' Mistake, as well as ignorance, is, in our present state, inseparable from humanity. Every child of man is in a thousand mistakes, and is liable to fresh mistakes every moment. And a mistake in judgment may occasion a mistake in practice; yea, naturally leads thereto. I mistake, and possibly cannot avoid mistaking, the character of this or that man. I suppose him to be what he is not; to be better or worse than he really is. Upon this wrong supposition, I behave wrong to him; that is, more or less affectionately than he deserves. And by the mistake which is occasioned by the defect of my bodily organs I am naturally led so to do. Such is the present condition of human na

every

ture; of a mind dependent on a mortal body. Such is the state entailed on all human spirits, while connected with flesh and blood!

3. And unto dust thou shalt return."' How admirably well has the wise Creator secured the execution of this sentence on all the offspring of Adam! It is true He was pleased to make one exception from this general rule, in a very early age of the world, in favour of an eminently righteous man. So we read, Gen. v. 23, 24, after Enoch had "walked with God" three hundred sixty and five years, "he was not; for God took him :" he exempted him from the sentence passed upon all flesh, and took him alive into heaven. Many ages after, he was pleased to make a second exception; ordering the prophet Elijah to be taken up into heaven, in a chariot of fire, very probably by a convoy of angels, assuming that appearance. And it is not unlikely that he saw good to make a third exception in the person of the beloved disciple. There is transmitted to us a particular account of the apostle John's old age; but we have not any account of his death, and not the least intimation concerning it. Hence we may reasonably suppose that he did not die, but that, after he had finished his course, and "walked with God" for about a hundred years, the Lord "took him," as he did Enoch; not in so open and conspicuous a manner as he did the prophet Elijah.

4. But setting these two or three instances aside, who has been able, in the course of near six thousand years, to evade the execution of this sentence, passed on Adam and all his posterity? Be men ever so great masters of the art of healing, can they prevent or heal the gradual decays of nature? Can all their boasted skill heal old age, or hinder dust from returning to dust? Nay, who among the greatest masters of medicine has been able to add a century to his own years? yea, or to protract his own life any considerable space beyond the common period? The days of man, for above three thousand years, (from the time of Moses at least,) have been fixed, by a middling computation, at threescore