LETTER law of the vegetable kingdom. Sufficient produce XIII. for human food was made dependant on human industry. The ground required cultivation, in order to be fertile in the harvests, which a multiplying population would need. Where due attention to husbandry was not exerted, thorns and thistles, weeds and vegetation, uneatable or undesired by mankind, would grow up, instead of the roots and grains, that would be deemed most palatable and nutritious. This was the only sentence passed upon Adam, and it was clearly a personal benefit, as well as an admonition and an instrument of moral discipline. The loss of the beauties and of the rich luxuriance of a paradise of nature; the change from the state of a sovereign lord, fed by the bountiful productions streaming around him, inviting him to their ready and abundant banquet, into the condition of a husbandman who must toil for his subsistence, and be dependent on the degree of his own skill, industry and care, and on the elemental favors; these new circumstances were an unceasing lesson to himself and to his posterity, of the error and folly of not living in obedience to God, and in grateful docility to Him. But at the same time this humiliation, and the mortifying remembrances that would be ever arising from it, were highly serviceable to the formation of a moral and nobler character within him. They provided him with an employment for his daily time, and for the activities of his frame and spirit, which is always a pleasure, if it be not immoderate. He was far more certain of becoming a superior being out of Paradise, than he could have then been in one. Our present experience satisfies us of this truth. Wherever we find, as in some regions of the

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tropic zone, that the abundance of nature is so lavish, LETTER and the human population in the locality so small, that they have all the effects of a spontaneous produce around them, and have only to pluck and to eat without toil or care: There, the human creature is an inferior being; his labor not being necessary to his subsistence, he dislikes all work, and passes his day in the indolence, the sensuality, and the stupidity of the swinish animal, or is only more active to be more mischievous and unhappy. Man, in voluptuous sloth, is a degraded animal, and it is only that industry, those energies, and that inventive activity, which this appointed system of his labor being necessary to his subsistence compels and has created, that have led him to all the arts and manufactures which distinguish civilized life, and to the genius, the talent, and the ennobling qualities and actions by which human nature has been adorned.

The truth is, that the continuity of a Paradise of pleasure, is not the best first state for the human being, tho it will be his fittest and felicitating ulterior

one.

Man must be first trained and formed under a different system of things, that will call out and fashion and exercise all the excellence and improveabilities of his wonderful capacity, into the great moral and intellectual being which he can be educated to be; and then, when his tuition is completed, and all his grand and lovely capabilities have been produced and established efficiently within him, and his primeval nature has thus become transformed and cultivated into a richer and nobler one-then, a Paradise will be, not his perversion, but his reward, and become to him a scene of godlike activities, of divine assimilation, and of proportionate felicity.

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Our gracious Creator foresaw all these truths, but placed man at first in the garden of Eden, that it might become fixed in the memory of his human race, that perfect happiness was the appointed companion of perfect obedience to Him; that human existence had begun with the enjoyment of this felicity, on this condition; and that the same paradisaical state is only attainable again, by the same means and on the same principle. But being then unsuitable to man, in the unformed state of his primeval mind, he was removed from it into that mixed condition of nature, into that necessity of exertion and that excitement to it, under which he has been ever since subsisting.

Very few circumstances have been transmitted to us of this second state of man, but it seems to have been a mixture of agricultural and pastoral life in its simplest state. The clothing of Adam and Eve was merely that of skins, a mode of dress which some of the northern Indians still use, and even the Wallachian peasantry. This is an important intimation in one respect, as it implies that the new abode of our first parents, was of a different and colder temperature, than that of Eden. It indicates a transfer from a torrid to a temperate zone, as for this an apparel of skins was best adapted. 'Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground." Thus Adam brought up his children to the several occupations of husbandry, and of domesticating the mildest class of the useful animals. Cain settled his family in that collected state which constitutes a town: but it was not till the sixth generation after him, that any

7 Gen. iv. 2.

And he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch.' Gen. iv. 17.

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of the arts began to be cultivated, and these first LETTER appeared among the children of his descendant Lamech. One of these began the Arab and Tartar style, of living in tents and breeding cattle, so that this form of human society began before the flood:" another invented the harp and the organ, or commenced the production and cultivation of the music of sound:10 another became an artificer in brass and iron, and thereby indicates that he had found out a process for smelting metallic ores and of working them into serviceable instruments." These are all the notices we have of the occupations of the antediluvian race. One portion of it was for some time more virtuous and religious than the other; but intermingling by marriages," the morality of all diminished: and by the time that Noah had attained his 500th year, violence and voluptuousness had become the general habit of society, and characterized its individual life.13 The corruption was so universal as to be incurable. The same cause brought on the same effect. Disregard of the laws of God and disobedience to Him produced, as their natural consequence, vice and evil, and destroyed human happiness. Mutual warfare and depredation on the one hand, and personal depravity on the other, made human life a scene of misery, and degraded and spoilt human nature itself. The plans and wishes of the Deity for the benefit and improvement of His

Adah bare Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.' Gen. iv. 20.

10 His brother's name was Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.' Ib. 21.

11 Zillah bare Tubal-cain, an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron.' Ib. 22.

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LETTER human creatures, were thus again defeated by their rebellion and perversity. The blessings which He had caused the material course of nature which then prevailed, to impart to them, had only made them more self-elated and contumacious. His gift of longevity, had thus been abused into more powerful means of mischief and debasement: and He resolved to terminate this condition of human nature, by the extinction of its deteriorated population; and to renew it under an altered system of nature, and under new circumstances of its existence, which would constitute its third state, and which is that in which it has ever since continued, and is now subsisting. This revolution would be another monitory instance, that human happiness and obedience to God are inseparably linked together, and that man cannot live in the habit of disobedience to the Divine laws, without perpetually producing moral evil and personal suffering. A deluge of waters, that should overwhelm all that was living, was the chosen instrument of effecting this awful dispensation.