to us from Heaven: it is to revelation, therefore, we must have recourse for the commencement of our history. No one could have known whence came the world that we inhabit, if God had not spoken from heaven to disclose the secret. For many ages after the creation, we have no information but what is contained in the Holy Scriptures; therefore, though Sacred History is not the peculiar object of our writing, it is with it we must of necessity begin.

As we know not where in the boundlessness of eternity time began, or where it will have an end, we have no means of dating events but by reckoning backwards and forwards from some known event. As Christians, we use the birth of Christ for this purpose-the event to us of the most deep importance. Thus our only way of determining when the world was created is, by knowing it was 4004 years before the birth of Christ. From that point we may again date forward, as is done in reckoning Ann: Mund: but, in this history, we shall prefer to make use of the Ant: Christ: or backward dates.

Four thousand and four years before the birth of our Saviour, it pleased the great God of all things to create for himself a world, in which to show forth his glory and the greatness of his power. Why he made it at all, or why he made it as he did, is not for us to know. It is enough that it was his work; and as God is in himself infinitely good and infinitely wise, his work must be the best it could be. If we see evil in the world he made, we must be fully assured that was no part of his work. When a mischievous hand defaces a fair picture, we do The blemish, whence

not say the artist painted it amiss. soever it arose, came afterwards. For, in the beginning, God himself pronounces that his work is good.

The only account we have of the creation is in the first chapters of Genesis, which Moses, by the direct inspiration of God, was enabled to write more than two thousand years after the event took place; a record which the same divine power has preserved through

many thousand years for our instruction. Whether or not the earth had been made before, we think is not positively stated; but it was without form, and void-a shapeless, uninhabited mass-till, breathing upon it by the Spirit of his power, the great Creator peopled it with creatures of forms and faculties as various as we now behold them; producing first the vegetable, then the animal creation; and lastly man, the noblest of his works on earth, the lord and possessor of all the rest; and, having finished the work in what is termed in scripture six days, the Almighty Being sanctified the seventh, to be a day of rest for ever to his people. Reviewing his work, He pronounced it good. Evil he created none.

The precise spot in which the Father of mankind was placed is not determined; but the description given of Paradise, speaks it to have been somewhere in that part of Asia, afterwards called Mesopotamia. On this spot began the history of the world. A single pair of happy beings, strangers to sorrow and to sin, strangers to every thing but good; surrounded with ten thousand blessings and endowed with ample powers to enjoy them; happy in fond affection for each other, and in constant communication with their God-these were the first and sole inhabitants of our globe, the parents of all who have succeeded them. It is hard for us now to imagine what might be its beauty then, or what the measure of their bliss. We can but imagine it by the unnumbered blessings that remain, and the many enjoyments allowed us, even now that the earth has been cursed for our sake, and taught to bring forth the brier and the thorn. our first parents' happiness was short as it was perfect. A test of their obedience to God had been appointed. It is said they were forbidden to eat the fruit of one particular tree: they disobeyed the command and incurred the penalty of death, the forfeiture of their present happiness. It has seemed to some too hard a punishment for so small a fault as the eating once of a fruit for

But

bidden; but one act of disobedience is as sinful as another. Whether it were a great thing or a little thing that God commanded, it was his command, and therefore to break it was to commit as great a sin as could be committed by a creature against his Creator. He had made them of dust, he had created a world for their use, dressed it with every beauty, thronged it with every blessing. Could there be a greater crime than to disregard the only injunction he laid on them? It is to be feared the same false estimate of right and wrong pursues us still. Towards each other, crimes may be greater or less, according to the mischief they do. The man who murders another commits a greater crime towards his fellow-creatures than he who profanes the sabbath, because he does a greater injury; but God, who forbade the one, forbade the other: he receives no injury from either, but is alike disobeyed in both, and disobedience to him is the greatest of all sins. We should do well to consider this, when disposed to treat as trifling any thing that is in opposition to his will. No sin against God can be a little one.

It is not our intention here to give the narrative of our first parents' fall. It is told in the first few chapters of Genesis, with a simplicity more striking than any thing we can write: but we must contemplate for a moment the consequences of their disobedience, since all that now passes in the world is the result of it, and we are ever prone to forget that we are not now what our Maker first created us. Scarcely any thing we see or read can be understood, if the fall of man is forgotten; for all without it is a maze of contradiction and inconsistency. Productions the most wonderful, the most magnificent, made the instrument of the basest crimes -gifts so bountiful, so precious, become the source of incalculable misery-man, the created Lord of all, become of all the greatest sufferer. How are we to understand it, if this first great change is forgotten or disbelieved? But we have in this event the key of all

that follows in the varied history of our world-man created happy, and provided with every means of continuing so, but becoming otherwise by a voluntary act of disobedience.

Death was the penalty incurred-the death and corruption of the body in the grave, and the soul's eternal condemnation in a future state. But our subject is rather with its consequences as affecting the present world. In the day they ate they died; that is, their bodies became liable to disease, suffering, and decay; their minds to error, ignorance, and sin. God's favour was withdrawn from them. The laws he had given remained written on their hearts, but their hearts were no longer disposed to keep them; for they ceased to love the Being they had offended, and now regarded as an angry master. Driven forth from a paradise in which sorrow could not reach them, the fallen pair went out upon the earth, accursed now and desolate, to win from it, by the sweat of their brow, what before it had borne them so abundantly. It did not please the Creator at once to destroy his work or to withdraw his gifts-they all remained, like a magnificent ruin, beautiful in disorder, and often dangerous in their beauty. With the fairest flowers of Eden came up the thistle and the poisonous weed-with the soft dews and refreshing showers, were mixed the storm and hurricane: it was then, probably, the animal creation received their mischievous and destructive propensities, and man found many a formidable foe amongst the creatures he was created to command; but none so great as the evil that had taken birth in his own bosom. Powers and faculties befitting an immortal being, and capable of growing improvement through eternal ages, were left at his disposal; but he had forgotten how to use them. Even his virtues, the traces of a holier nature that remained within him, assumed the colouring of sins, when he forgot from whom he had them, and took the merit to himself. Thus was our world placed in a condition of which the results might be expected to be exactly what they are-a strange mix

ture of all that is most beautiful, with whatever is base and unseemly-a picture of God's tremendous wrath, mingled with most tender and forbearing mercy. Well. might he at the moment have restored his world to the unshapen mass from which he formed it, or have kept it for more worthy habitants; but he had an intention of mercy in leaving it as it was-in suffering his rebellious creatures to fill up the measure of their folly, that he might exercise upon them the utmost of his love: when, having borne with their misdeeds, and suffered them to misuse his gifts through a long succession of ages and generations of men, he should at last restore his work to the perfection and purpose for which he formed it.

We are not told that Adam removed far from the spot at which he was placed at first: it was, therefore, from that part of Asia that the children of men gradually spread themselves to people the earth. We shall briefly revert to the little information we have of their early history.

Adam lived, it is said, nine hundred and thirty years. It may be doubtful whether those years were computed in the manner of ours; but certainly life was then extended much beyond its present period. Nothing is mentioned of his after conduct. In him, perhaps, the practical effects of a corrupted nature did not appear. God's signal vengeance on his first transgression, the bitter remembrance of the bliss he had forfeited, joined perhaps to the hope of future pardon through the promised Saviour, whose coming was already doubly predicted, might well recall him to such imperfect service as he was capable of rendering to his Maker: but in his descendants the evil appeared in all its malignity, and the first death was by a brother's hand. Cain, the eldest born of man, slew his brother Abel, because he had offered a sacrifice more acceptable to heaven than his own. Why it was so, we are not told. Probably because Abel offered the sacrifice God had ordained, and Cain something of his own devising.

But, though one such crime opens our nature's history,