others refer, is that most gracious one, spoken, as is supposed, by the Angel of the Covenant, on the condemnation of our unhappy progenitors in Paradise. Before sentence was passed upon them, and whilst they stood in trembling expectation of their doom, conscious of their guilt, and foreseeing in some degree their wretched fate, they were allowed to hear the judgment on the Serpent, and to gather, from his punishment, hopes of mercy. "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." However obscure this prophecy might appear, it clearly implied some decisive advantage, at a future period, to be obtained by the Seed of the woman over the Serpent, who had been her corrupter and destroyer, and between whom and the children of men, a feeling of enmity was appointed by God to exist. At the time when this prophecy was declared, there was no child born to Adam. It could not, therefore, but make them anxiously look forward to an increase of their kind, since on the result of such increase, depended the blessing, whatever it might be, on which their hopes were hung. Accordingly, when Eve, in process of time, brought forth her first-born son, she exclaimed, "I have gotten a man from the Lord;" evidently referring to the prophetic promise, and probably expecting, that in this very son, it would have its accomplishment. At least the birth of this son was an earnest of the fulfilment of the promise, because till a child was born into the world, it could not

possibly be said to be in an evident train of completion.

Eve, however, had several sons, which must have weakened the expectation of the first-born, Cain, being the prophetic Seed. In order, therefore, to point out the distinct line through which the Messiah should come, we find, that after the death of Abel, who was more righteous than his brother Cain, another son was born to her, whose name was Seth, that is, appointed or substituted, "For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew." The expression another seed, leaves no question on the mind as to the allusion which Eve intended, for Cain being rejected of God, and Abel dead, the redemption by her descendants was, for the present, cut off. From Seth the sacred historian gives a regular table of descents down to Lamech, the father of Noah, with whom the patriarchal dispensation of the old world terminates. Lamech, on the birth of his son Noah, uses a speech, which shows how well the history of the fall was then remembered by the true worshippers of God. "This same," said he, "shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed." It is to be observed, that in this table of descents, which runs from Seth to Enoch, Methuselah, and Noah, the chosen line only is enumerated, for the sake of brevity, and merely to point out the direct course of the Messiah.

Noah, the connecting link of two worlds, the last of the old economy and the first of the new,

stands at the head of a kind of second creation, and like his great forefather Adam, is a son of God, a servant accepted and sanctified, a preacher of righteousness, a declarer of prophecy, and a type of the promised Redeemer. In the sentence which he pronounced upon his three sons, he described the future fortunes of the whole race of mankind, confining the line of the Redeemer's succession to Shem, and declaring that Japheth should dwell in the tents of Shem. This remarkable prophecy becomes clear to us, when it is observed, that Shem gave rise to the Jewish community, as we shall presently see, and that Japheth is the father of those Gentiles who have already become members of the Christian dispensation, or are, at least, to become such in time; whilst Ham's posterity, whom the patriarch cursed, were the wretched Canaanites, whom Joshua and the Children of Israel subdued and destroyed, and whose descendants, comparatively few in number, remain in a state of vassalage to this day.

Hitherto the dispensations of God with respect to the promised Redeemer have been distinguished by no very striking peculiarity, either of personal desert or specific promise. The history of the world has been too concise and limited to afford room for the fuller delineation of character, or to give more than a bare outline of the narrative of events. the persons of whom it treats were, in general, godly men, and that it was owing to their godliness that the promised Redeemer was to spring from them, is all that can be gathered; and it is probable that

That

the great age to which men attained before the flood, by which traditional knowledge would be easily kept up, and the great advantage there was in Noah's preaching, who lived to an hundred and fifty years after the flood, rendered any farther revelation of God's purpose with regard to the Redeemer unnecessary, even had it been suitable in those early periods. But whatever was the cause with God, from the fall of Adam to the call of Abraham, there was no other prophecy or promise of the Redeemer but that which was implied in the Serpent's doom.

We come now upon a new era in the history of mankind.

Abraham was born about two hundred and thirty years after the death of Noah, and sprung from the line of Shem, who was cotemporary with Abraham, and lived after the patriarch's call a considerable portion of a century. The original promise of a Deliverer in the Seed of the woman, must, therefore, have reached the venerable founder of the Jewish race, and been treasured up by him, since he was living in the same age with the son of Noah, that distinguished father of the new world. But the life of man, for wise reasons, began now to be rapidly shortened, each succeeding generation losing somewhat of its father's longevity. To supply the defect in historical knowledge caused by this more rapid succession of generations, as well as for other important considerations connected with the then state of the world, God was pleased to begin

a new course of revelations, in which the birth of the promised Redeemer was more expressly announced, and his descent more clearly specified. The first promise had merely said that he should be the Seed of the woman, leaving the event open to all the families of the earth. But now, God proceeded to limit it to a single family, calling upon Abraham to come forth out of his own country, Chaldea, and promising, as the reward of his faith and trust in him, that in his "seed should all the nations of the earth be blessed." It required a faith like Abraham's to see through this prophecy and understand its signification; and we are told that he did see through it, that he beheld the day of Christ afar off, and was glad. The Seed of the woman was now to become his seed. He was to be the father of Him who was to bruise the Serpent's head. In no other sense could the patriarch be a blessing to all nations, whatever he might be to the Jews; and to no other is the prophecy referable, but to that great blessing of a Redeemer first conveyed to our abashed progenitors in Paradise. The two prophecies taken together expound and strengthen each other. Separate them, and they both fall to the ground for want of consistency.

The patriarch Abraham had several sons. He had one, in particular, by Hagar, before Sarah bore him an heir. But the promise was limited to Sarah's offspring, and accordingly we find it written, "In Isaac shall thy seed be called." That the hope of a Redeemer to come began now to be strongly che