are infected. The third proposition made to our last triumphant Head was, that he should cast himself down from a battlement of the Temple in the sight of the assembled people, and thereby attract their admiration and reverence. In my last letter the correspondence between the first and second Adams, with the summary of the propensities which prevail in human nature since the fall, as stated by St. John, (1 Epist. ii. 16.) was fully pointed out in the words of the excellent Vitringa.

These undoubted correspondences between the trial of the first Adam and that of the second, may prepare the way for a conjecture concerning the period of Adam's continuance in Paradise. "The words of St. Luke," says the late Reverend William Jones, "seem to imply, that the period of forty days of our Lord's temptation refers to some other transaction of the Scriptures, as a counterpart and accomplishment. He says,

"When the days were fulfilled;' the word being the same as in that passage of St. Mark, What shall be the sign when all these things shall be fulfilled?' Perhaps then there is also an exact correspondence in the length of time employed in the two cases. The forfeiture and the recovery, so far as concerns the combat between the respective Representatives of mankind and the Tempter, may have been severally accomplished in the same number of days. Such an hypothesis

FORTY.

sheds light on a variety of circumstances mentioned in Scripture, in connexion with the number If the remarkable reference to this number may be traced up to the grand and awful trial in Paradise, that reference will be accounted for. The execution of the curse in the general deluge, a curse which originated in the sin committed in Paradise (comp. Gen. vii. 17.) occupied forty days, connecting, as it should seem, the sin and the punishment in the view of every reader of the history. The land of promise was to the Israelites a second Paradise, and their probation in the wilderness is a counterpart of that to which our first parents were subjected. That probation presented, on the one hand, its Manna, answering to the Tree of Life in Eden; and, on the other, its temptations to an indulgence of the lusts of the flesh, of the eyes, and the pride of life,' in the circumstances of the quails, the golden calf, the rebellion of Corah, &c. in which will be found a resemblance of the Tree that was 'good for food, pleasant to the eyes, and much to be desired to make one wise.' Now the representatives of the Israelites, the spies whom they sent to search out the land, had a foretaste of that Paradise for forty days: (Num. xiv. 34.) and the people who murmured at the account given of the promised inheritance, were condemned to wander forty years in the wilderness, a year for a day. This surely is, to say the least, a remarkable coincidence.

"But this is not all. The prophet Jonah was directed to announce to the Ninevites the destruction of their city within forty days, unless they repented; this period being granted for preventing the threatened calamity. The Israelitish Lawgiver Moses, when he received from the hands of God the tables of that law, which, in substance, had been originally inscribed on the human heart, but which the sin of Adam had erased thence, and which was now inscribed on tables of stone, spent forty days and forty nights on the mount in humiliation and prayer, neither eating bread, nor drinking water. This law, thus republished by Moses, was afterwards vicariously fulfilled in the obedience of Christ, of whose obedience a fast of forty days was a signal branch; a fast not occasioned by any sin of his own, but by the sinful indulgence of the flesh by our first parents. The fast of Moses was repeated for other forty days, when he went the second time up to the mount to receive another copy of the law in lieu of the tables which he had broken. Elijah also, the great Jewish Reformer, fasted forty days in the same wilderness where his predecessor Moses had fasted, and in which the Israelites had wandered forty years. Connecting all these circumstances together may we not say, with the author from whom I have borrowed the above, that, as our Lord' died and rose again according to the Scriptures, so he also fasted according to the

same Scriptures, taken in that analogical view which is sanctioned by themselves on many other points of faith and practice?"

Great pains have been taken to demonstrate that the threatening denounced against eating the prohibited fruit, comprehended nothing more than natural death, the separation of soul and body. Bishop Gleig, in his edition of "Stackhouse's history of the Bible," has patronized this opinion: an opinion which I consider to be inconsistent with Scripture, and also with the ninth article* and the Baptismal service of the Church of England, as well as with the quotation from the Homily on the Nativity which I have produced at the beginning of this letter. If we are" born in sin, and children of wrath," in consequence of being "engendered of the offspring of Adam ;" and if “birth-sin, in every person born into this world, deserveth God's wrath and damnation;" and if, in morals as well as in nature, the stream can rise no higher than the fountain head: then surely, that which deserveth "God's wrath and damnation" in the children of Adam, must have de

* The Reviewer of Bp. Gleig's edition of Stackhouse (British Review, Vol. x. p. 155.) has, in two or three places, doubtless by an unintentional mistake, substituted or for and in quoting the article. "Original sin is the fault AND corruption" of human nature. It is both and if it be the fault, guilt is certainly implied.

"Everlasting damnation both of body and soul" must surely mean more than temporal death, or even annihilation.

served it in the parent from whom it is inherited; and much more than the mere dissolution of soul and body, or even than the loss of conscious existence, must have been comprised in the awful threatening, “Thou shalt surely die." But let us consider the point in a closer view of it. The act of transgression was an act of suicide, which was at once effectual. The life of the soul consists in communion with God, or in a participation of his Spirit. That communion was suspended the moment the forbidden fruit touched the lips of the trangressors: rather, the moment of hesitation was that of spiritual death. It is a striking though a quaint view of this subject which is given by the well known author of The Holy War, when, in describing a parley between the inhabitants of Mansoul and the besieging army of Diabolus, he represents the death of Mr. Innocence, one of the former, as occasioned by the fetid breath of Old Ill-Pause, one of the latter. Now what is eternal death but a perpetuation of the state to which man reduced himself by sin, from which he had no power of self-recovery, and in which all must continue for ever without the "grace of Christ and the inspiration of his Spirit?" It cannot be said that Adam died. a natural death on the day that he ate of the forbidden fruit, for he lived 930 years after it; but on that very day, and in that very hour and moment, he died spiritually, the vital connexion