were in your apprehension inconsiderable; cease to wonder that one more powerful was not chofen, when you recollect that even this, weak as it was, proved capable of overcoming the religious resolution of those whom it assailed. Reflect further, in the next place, that in the situation in which Adam and Eve found themselves in Paradise; the only existing individuals of the human race; with every want anticipated; before the sight or found of distress was known; antecedently to the introduction of arts, and of commerce, and of separate property, and of gradations of rank and power, and of all those habits and institutions of ciyil society which have proved, since the earth became replenished with inhabitants, the most efficacious stimulants of the passions of men, and consequently the most dan. gerous incentives to sin; few, if any, of those temptations, by resistance to which from a principle of obedience to the will of God human virtue is now to be evinced, could possibly have had an opportunity of presenting themselves.

Still however you may think that the punishment was disproportioned to the offence. So slight a transgression as the gathering of a prohibited fruit to be instantly followed by the loss of the Divine savour, by the forfeiture of existence, by woes and calamities reaching to the latest posterity of the offenders! Recollect then, that this punishment, great as it might be, was no new penalty devised after the transgression. It was that penalty which the transgressors, fore-warned and fully instructed, had known from the day of their creation to be

already already ordained as the inevitable consequence of guilt. Recollect also that the direct communication, which the Supreme Being had permitted to take place between himself and his creatures, had precluded the possibility of a doubt in the minds of Adam and Eve as to the reality of the Divine command. But you judge most erroneously in terming their transgression slight. The sin consisted not simply in gathering the fruit; but in breaking the commandment of God, who had enjoined them to abstain from it: the single commandment of him, who of his own free grace had called the offenders into being; had crowned them with innumerable benefits; had put immortality and unimpairable happiness into their power, subject only to the observance of one condition; a condition so plain as to be incapable of being misunderstood, and so easy of performance as scarcely to seem to admit the possibility of failure. The mode in which disobedience might be manifested was of little moment. The guilt was in the disobedience itself'. and was evidently most heinous.

Let us now return to the judgment pronounced against the Serpent: a judgment not more full of terror to the victorious enemy of mankind than of consolation to those, whom he had degraded into a state of sin and misery. To him, under the emblem of the reptile, whose instrumentality he had employed in his diabolical machinations, the Divine vengeance foretold disappointment, and humiliation, and anguish, and irrecoverable destruction. A future "seed of the woman" was darkly announced;

who

who aster experiencing some temporary injury equivalent to a bruise on the heel, from the power and malignity of the serpent, should vindicate the cause of man, and the glory of God, by a complete triumph over the adversary, by " bruising the serpent's head."

Here there was a direct intimation given to man of the great plan formed and predetermined in the divine counsels for the redemption of the human race through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; who, in reference to this predetermination, is styled in the New Testament " the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world "fk)." To what extent the details of this gracious and stupendous plan were then unfolded to Adam, the Scriptures do not explain. Susficient however was revealed to enable him to look up with humble hope, on the part of himself and of his posterity, to their future deliverer from the dominion of sin and the grave.

In process of time- a first-born son and other children successively encreased the family of Adam, now no longer an inhabitant of Paradise; children born "in his own likeness, after his image;" with a nature depraved, corrupt, andfinful, like that of their progenitor; not "in the likeness of God," which the Scriptures almost in the fame sentence (/). as though it were to prevent the possibility of mistaking their meaning respecting the image in which the children of Adam were born, again aver to have been that in which Adam was originally formed. Here, according to the analogy which -we still see subsisting throughout the whole living creation, in which the offspring universally inherits and partakes of the nature of the parent; man, become frail and prone to guilt, produced a race frail and prone to guilt like himself. The corrupt tree could not but bear corrupt fruit. In like manner the next generation resembled in its nature that from which it sprang. Every individual of the human race born or yet to be born, with the single exception of our Lord Jesus Christ when he assumed the form of man, inevitably brings with him into the world the nature of fallen Adam. And "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ" only shall any "be made alive (pi)."—'* There is none "other name under heaven given among men, ** whereby we must be saved(«)."

The radical corruption of human nature is one of those truths, which their very plainness renders it the less easy to support by formal prooss. If a person be unmoved by the decisive arguments, which press upon him every moment at every turn; you scarcely know in what manner to address him on the subject. Happily the minds of youth are not thus hardened against' fair reasoning and honest conviction. They have not been familiarised with sin sufficiently to have become blind to its inherent enormity. They have not yet been inured by long habits of guilt to " call evil good, and good ** evil (o)." They are not obstructed with those

prepossessions,

(m) i Cor. xv. 22. (n) Acts, iv. 12.

(0) Isaiah, v. 20.

prepossessions, nor intoxicated with that self-conceit, so common among persons more advanced in life; who have formed to themselves a favorite system, and examine not all, or without candour, any evidence against it. Let young persons then search the Scriptures, to fee whether these things be so or not; and they will find the depravity of human nature inculcated in the strongest terms throughout the sacred writings - and inculcated not only as an undeniable fact, but as the corner-stone of Christianity. Let them look diligently into their own minds; and they will be convinced that the continual indisposition to righteousness and proneness to transgression, which they will discover there, can be ascribed to no other cause. Let them behold what passes in the world around them; and they will be satisfied that the prevailing wickedness of mankind can be traced to no other source. They will perceive that in this as in every other instance reason and experience unite in bearing testimony to the truth of the word of God.

The natural effects of the Fall were soon felt most severely in the family of Adam. Cain, his eldest son, murdered his own brother Abel; murdered him because the righteousness of Abel procured from Heaven the acceptance of his sacrifice, while the guilt of Cain caused his offering to be rejected by the Lord. The avenging justice of God immediately drove Cain from the land; and condemned him to be a wretched vagabond on the face of the earth. Adam had to deplore, in the loss of twq,

sons