pendance upon his Creator been sincere, and his obedience that of the willing mind and filial heart, and his faith that which rested content with the explicit promise and pledge of God-these principles would have been sufficient to have kept him from diverging into error, and again bringing the almost universal judgment of God upon the world.

But before we come to the consideration of this, we cannot pass by without remark what seems to us a very striking peculiarity in this first stage of men's probation as the moral subjects of God. In their first state, obedience to him was tested by a very simple ordinance, and nothing more was prescribed for direction, or required in point of obedience. In the second stage, principles of belief and laws of obedience toward God are to some extent propounded and enacted. In the whole of that record, however, we meet with no prescribed rule in any shape in regard to their duties to each other. Now we say this seems plainly to have been done designedly. Man had fallen, and the operations of his intellect, however it might expand, were still under the influence of perverting causes, and his heart corrupted by evil feelings towards God; but we might have supposed that the law of fatherly, and filial, and brotherly affection, was too indelibly written on the heart of man to require any positive precept to inculcate it as a duty. We do not any where find that it was, nor do we see that in those days it was at all necessary. Temptations to selfishness and avarice, and injustice and oppression, could not then exist in the blighting power which they possess in the complicated and unnatural social system of the modern world; and for two thousand years the relation of father and son, of brother and sister, could easily be traced. These duties, then, were not prescribed by positive enactment and with penal sanction, because they were elementary principles of human nature. But what was the result of this new probation? How did these indestructible laws of humanity operate in this new world, in guiding men in the path of moral duty and brotherly charity? Strong and indelible as these natural principles were, explicit as is their voice, it is impossible to imagine that any test could have been more outraged. The first-born of the human family, in his fiendish envy, slew his first brother, and, in the violence of his ferocious yet deliberate hate, thought he had done no ill. God interferes, and marks with the brand of his severest displeasure the first-recorded of human crimes, and points out the fratricide as a detested and excommunicated wanderer over the face of the earth. But did this terrible in

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stance of God's denouncing this crime of unnatural hate and cruelty efficiently hold forth the duty of humanity as a prescribed and sanctioned law of his moral government? We have not, indeed, the particular history of that period minutely recorded, nor the steps of advancing moral depravity marked; but hints are given, in the course of the short narrative, which prove that licentiousness, and vice, and crime, advanced by rapid and fearful strides, till, according to the declaration of God himself, "all flesh had corrupted their ways before him, and the earth was filled with violence." This corruption is announced to us, not so much as having its origin directly, at least in its atrocious extent, in a defection from religious truth, as in a giant-trampling down of all the sacredness of the duties of the social relations of man. We do not know certainly what was the progress of mankind in the arts and sciences of life, and in general knowledge, though we are told that some of the arts and elegant tastes of civilized life, as we would call them, were known and appreciated by these antediluvian sensualists, and societies had been formed and cities built. But whatever were their arts of refinement or sciences of profound study, they had not refined and purified those affections of holy character that have their principles and seeds in the human heart, and will blow there with all the fragrance and freshness of the roses of Eden, if they are not choked with weeds of rank growth and spontaneous culture-whatever was their knowledge or their study of the laws and the works of nature, it is clear that this knowledge had not led them upward through the gradations of material creation to the right knowledge of and dependance upon her author, and reverential obedience to those laws he had given.

In this first period of the world's history, then, men were tried under a system of truths that were sufficient to have kept them right in their knowledge of God, and faith in his promises tried by their own powers and the moral elements of practical duty, which need no revelation, and which no revelation could have rendered clearer, and, in a certain sense, more binding. These primary elements of better feeling and purer affection form the very essence of that higher principle in our nature, to which all revelation must appeal--the data, on the part of man, upon which satisfactory and persuasive demonstration, on the part of God, must rest for its apprehension, and reception, and effectual working. It is an erroneous and dangerous view of human nature to suppose, that all its intellectual and moral elements are so disrupted and debased, as

not to comprehend the revealed truth of God, or feel its power, or perceive the beauty of that moral perfection which it inculcates and demands. "The carnal heart is indeed enmity against God:" there is a fearful searedness of conscience, a deadness of moral feeling, the result of a habitual indulgence in sin, which may extinguish almost all moral sensibility, and blind the moral perspicacity. But this diseased and deadened state of the moral being is the result and effect of man's quenching the voice of conscience within him, and shutting his eyes to the statutes of that eternal law, which are deeply engraved on the living tablets of the heart. When this wide departure from God, this terrible abuse of the understanding and the feelings of the heart, have reached their deepest descent into the dark and putrescent atmosphere of corruption, prophets teach, and miracles demonstrate, and judgment warns, and the voice of tender and beseeching mercy invites and reclaims in vain. All this was done in the world before the flood-in the days of Enoch, the friend and prophet of God, and denouncer of the coming judgments upon the ungodly-in the days of Noah, the preacher of righteousness and all along from the sentence of Eden and the announcement of the remedy, and deliverance from that sentence. But though they must have known that they were outraging every principle of their being, and every law of their nature, these gigantic rebels in wickedness seem to have come to the deliberate conclusion, that a thousand years' indulgence in the pleasures of sin was more than worth a distant and invisible, and, as they no doubt at last persuaded themselves, an uncertain and chimerical future.

But

In regard to this first period of the probation of fallen humanity, we say that the antediluvian dispensation of religion, the revelation that God gave of himself, of his moral government, of the new destiny and prospects of man, was in complete accordance with the then apparent extent of his intellect and knowledge, with all his felt wants and weaknesses. mankind did not choose to adhere to, and be satisfied with, this simple system of divine teaching. They soon invented another scheme of their own, and this seems to have been one of downright atheism. Those "sons of God," as they are called in the sixth chapter of Genesis, are, we think, the progeny of the giant tyrants of the world; and they seem to have thought that there was no other God than themselves who cared for, or interfered with the affairs of mankind. They seem to have claimed all the abject worship and degrading service of the

enslaved minds and bodies of their subjects, and these seem to have rendered it. They domineered with the assumed power of gods, and seem to have persuaded their obsequious vassals that there was no higher deity to be acknowledged or served. Such a state of things could not last in the groaning and crime-polluted earth, and all these atheist dynasties of pride and cruelty were swept away by the flood.

We might follow onward in equal detail the succeeding manifestations of the divine will to man, the widening development of his moral government, and the progressive advancement of his preparatory dispensations. The prospect becomes broader, and more copious in materials for profound thought, as we proceed downwards in the history of time, under the unerring guidance of the divine historian, who knows, because he constructed, all the secret wheels and springs that brought forth the events which chequer the narrative of the progressing destinies of the earth, to demonstrate his own sovereignty as a God of holiness, and justice, and mercy. But we need not occupy much space in discussing the new form of religion and moral precept that was given, or rather renewed, to Noah, with external and internal additions. He knew the promise of future deliverance, and continued in sacrifice the commemorative rite of that mysterious hope. But an intimation was given that this universal blessing would come through the family of Shem, and this coupled with a prophetic history of the descendants of the three sons of the patriarch. Then there was a definite promise, or covenant, with a visible sign that God would not any more destroy the earth with a flood. He had given sufficiently strong testimony of the hatefulness of sin in that awful lesson, and recorded it in indelible characters to all generations, so that there could never again be a necessity for repeating it upon such a universal scale.

We must, however, make some remarks upon the new grant of the animal creation as food for man, on the same extensive terms as the herbs and fruits of the earth; as if the earth herself were now less prolific in her productions, or as if God wished to show the sovereignty of his right to the new race of mankind. This grant is coupled with a very striking condition, previously not enjoined by any express command of the divine lawgiver. This is the prohibition of the cruel and unnecessary slaughter of the inferior animals, and eating that food with the blood. All is connected with the prohibition of the murder of man, as if this terrible power in the hands of beings such as we, and the familiar habit of bloodshed, would

lead to a reckless disregard to human life: "At the hand of every beast will I require your blood; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God made he man." We must confess, indeed, that we cannot prove, by direct evidence, that there were no positive enacted laws and tribunals of judgment in the elder world; but the total silence of Scripture in regard to that fact, and the wide charge of universal violence, and the individual instances mentioned, being left altogether to the vengeance of God, lead us to the conclusion that there were hitherto no positive laws among men, established by penal sanctions of divine or of human authority, but that every man was left in matters of social duty to the guidance of his own reason and his own feelings. The consequence of this state of things, in the terrible abuse to which it led, we have already seen. the above injunction upon the descendants of Noah then, we say, that we first meet the divine command, enforcing this primary law of humanity in the retaliation of a similar fate, as if obviously to hold out the heinousness of the crime by the certainty of present execution. This is the first discoverable germ of all future civil codes of law, the basis of that system of moral restraint, which we soon find the circumstances of society loudly called for.

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The system given to the new world is the same in substance as that enjoined upon the old, but it is considerably extended and supported by new sanctions and instances of God's sovereignty over the universe, and new basis of coming events upon which to support the faith and the hopes of the second race that was to people the world, and to be the subjects toward whom God was again to give the demonstration of his character as the holy ruler of accountable beings. Now of this new form, we say, that it was an onward progress, an elevating of the mind of man in a region of most important truths, in which the previous history of the world for two thousand years proved that he had no power and no will of his own to advance and to rise. If the truth of the general proposition were questioned, we have only to point backwards over the course of events which we have slightly reviewed, and forwards from the flood, to the recorded history of the human mind, as its character is displayed and its workings exhibited through the succeeding ages of its probation. We can contrast, as we go, the misdirected exertions and strange abortions of the human intellect, when left to make its own and its best interpretations of