dispute that Satan and his angels, the authors of the untold wickedness and the inconceivable sufferings of a race of intelligent beings like themselves, are worthy of punishment? Who will deny that such open, avowed, unblushing, daring, long continued, still persisted in, and uncompromised hostility and enmity against the will of a gracious, benevolent, kind, affectionate, compassionate, long-suffering, but almighty Creator, maintained in constant operation by His own creatures, merits a severe retribution? Who will hesitate to say that their damnation is just? And who can question the truth that God's creatures are free as the winds that blow, in the choice of their own will?

Glorious truth, while God's compassion is manifested in His forbearance for so long a time with rebellious spirits, and He is eternally manifested as just in consigning them to blackness and darkness; while He has left them and all His creatures free to choose and to do what they will and while; apparently, wicked spirits have been successful in destroying God's work, oh! hear it and be astonished, ye who love the Lord; oh! hear it and tremble, ye despisers of the great God and our Saviour, not one jot or one tittle of God's purpose has failed. He has chosen your delusions, ye wicked spirits. When you thought that your craft and subtlety had overreached your Maker's wisdom; when you thought you had completely frustrated His plans and foiled His purpose; when you thought that your will had been done and not His: know it, for it is the true saying of God, you were doing His will; you were doing what it would have been impossible for Him to have accomplished otherwise; you were, when pursuing your destructive course, fulfilling all His counsel, and doing all His

pleasure; you were made, unconsciously, but wickedly on your part, the instruments of making for thy God a glory and a renown which shall be the theme of the eternal praise of myriads upon myriads of holy and happy beings, while ye yourselves will live and give your silent acquiescence that all He did was right; for thy very speechless attitude, after so long a rebellion, will declare in the presence of angels and men in glory, and among yourselves in shame, that the God with whom ye had to do is a God that judgeth righteous judgment, who ruleth in all things well.

God made man out of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him, and he became a living soul. In this state he was an image of the Life and the Word of God, the Father and the Son. He was left to form his own will, and for this purpose God prohibited him from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden of Eden. Had man believed, his will, his spirit, would have been the Will, the Spirit of God, and thus he would have been a complete image of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. It was God's purpose even then, and before the foundation of the world, to bring many sons unto glory-to crown man with glory and honour, and to set him over the work of His hand, and to put all things in subjection under his feet to make men like unto His Son in all things, except in regard to the incommunicable attributes of the Godhead. In Eden Adam had the nature of his God, but he had neither its glory nor its honour. Had he believed God, he could only have known Jehovah through the medium of his senses; all his knowledge would have been like himself, earthly, and there would have been no occasion for any further displays of the

invisible God than were given in the works of creation, for they declare His eternal power and godhead. Man, being godlike, had an aspiring nature. When he was created he had that peculiar craving which belongs to immortality; but, being dependent, he needed to have it restrained; therefore was there given to him a law in paradise, a commandment by no means grievous, for it was holy, just, and good. It was the aspiring part of Eve's nature to which Satan applied himself. He first shook her confidence in what Jehovah had said; and having removed this barrier-which, be it observed, is a rock to those who build upon it, standing upon which they are secure against the assaults of the adversarythis accomplished, there was no remaining power in the nature of Eve; and her immortality, her very likeness unto God, became the occasion of her temptation and seduction into sin. Satan said, In the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened; and ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil. She desired to be as God; to gain this, she disobeyed God, and became, like her seducer, the enemy of God. There was this great difference, she had not known the light of life; this was her first act as an accountable being; so that the sin of Adam and Eve, great though it was as a sin against a gracious God, was not the sin against the Holy Ghost. Satan told her what he knew to be untrue; Satan by falsehood deceived and beguiled her, and she did eat; and she gave unto her husband, and he did eat also. Still he little knew that while he was wickedly attempting her ruin, he was laying the foundation of that glorious superstructure, the erection of which is nearly completed, every stone of which, without exception, he and his angels and his children have polished and pre

pared for the great edifice, the everlasting temple of the everlasting God. He began his career by imparting to man a desire to be like God, while he intended his ruin; but God will bring, and has brought, to nought his counsel, and that by his own wicked instrumentality; for by redemption it was God's eternal purpose in Christ to make man, all men whom He created in Adam, like unto the Son of God. Those who would in the least possible degree hope or seek for justification by works or merit of any kind, but that which is divine, would do well just to ponder upon this part of the history of our race, and call to mind what is said by the apostle Paul in relation to this matter. "If there had been a law given, which could have given life, verily, righteousness should have been by the law." (Gal. iii. 21.) That is, if the law of paradise given to Adam could have given life, righteousness would have been by it. Why then wilt thou in a state of sin strive to do what thou knowest Adam could not do in a state of innocence; for hadst thou been there thyself, thou wouldst have acted as he did? Why not rather rejoice, "that what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin condemned sin in the flesh; that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." (Rom. viii. 3, 4.)

Immediately after the fall of man, the glorious purpose of God was obscurely indicated. Not even one of His children shall be lost; all of them, without a single exception, who were created in and who died in Adam, shall be made alive in Christ. Of all that have been born into the world, two-thirds have been God's children,

and one-third the children of the wicked one. The history of the world is divided into three chambers: the first being from the creation unto the birth of Abraham; the second terminating with the return of Joseph and Mary with the child Jesus from the land of Egypt; and the last from the date from which the christian era is reckoned until the end of the world. It is of the two last that God has been pleased to give a minute and detailed account in the Scripture history of what was past, and the Scripture prophecy of what was to come, when the vision was completed. In all the three periods the division has been the same, two-thirds being God's children in each, and one-third the children of the wicked one. We have already said that when Christ comes the second time without sin unto judgment, there shall be reserved for the manifestation of His glory upon this earth one-tenth of all the spoils retaken from the wicked one since the time of Abraham. Of the ninetenths who shall then be in the state of separate spirits, only one out of every hundred will have needed repentance; "for until the law, sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed where there is no law;" that is, they who do not sin after the similitude of Adam's transgression. A man may do so without the law; "for as many have sinned without law, shall also perish without law." This is the sin unto death, but there is a sin not unto death. All who die in infancy, knowing neither good nor evil, are among the ninety and nine justified persons who need no repentance. But there are also others among the Gentiles which have not the law, "who do by nature the things contained in the law, these having not the law are a law unto themselves; which show the work of the law, written in their hearts,