penitently to the feet of his Judge, ever ready to pardon. Let us consider, under this point of view, the first consequences of the fall. Let us contemplate man in his sin and in his folly; God as a Judge, in His just anger; finally, God as a Father, in His tender solicitude.

The promise of the seducer is accomplished, alas! too well accomplished, but very differently from what Adam expected. Such is the character of the father of lies, that even when one of his purposes or promises is accomplished to the letter, it conceals beneath it falsity and deception. Your eyes shall be opened, he had said to our first parents; ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. It is unnecessary to say, that these words of the tempter do not refer to the eyes of the body, which were always open to the light of heaven, and to the contemplation of the magnificent works of the Creator. The meaning of this deceitful promise was, that by the violation of the command of God, man's understanding, raised to a higher degree of superiority, would know by experience good and evil, and would be able to sound, like the Divinity Himself, all the mys

teries of the moral world. The end to be attained was apparently noble; our first parents, who would have despised a carnal temptation, fell, as we have already seen, into the subtle snare. But it was not long before the fatal result brought to light the real purpose of the seducer. Their eyes

were, indeed, opened.... to their sin, their misery, their utter ruin.

They knew good contrast with evil; Previous to their

and evil: good, by a sad evil, by fatal experience. fall, they had no idea of evil, no more than a man, plunged in a life altogether carnal and material, can have an idea of a spiritual life in God. Sin at first was not presented to them in all its native deformity, but under seducing colours. Now they taste its bitterness; they know it to their cost; they are left to deplore the subtlety of the enemy and their own folly.

This, and indeed every other part of the experience of our first parents in Eden, is repeated every day among the unhappy children of Adam. Six thousand years of crime and misery have not taught them to distrust their perfidious enemy. Each purchases, at the price of his sins and the woes they entail,

the fatal knowledge of good and evil. Sin, of whatever kind it be, presents itself with the most alluring attractions; it seems to meet a devouring want of a corrupt heart; it promises it the happiness which it pants after, the enjoyments which it ardently desires to possess. A thick bandage covers the eyes of the hapless individual, who rushes to his ruin. He surrenders himself up to the powerful inclination which hurries him along, as a savage beast rushes upon his prey. Alas! scarcely has he tasted the fatal fruit, when the bandage falls off, his eyes are opened, all is changed. The charm is dissolved, and a long and painful disappointment ensues. That which was invested with such seducing attractions, is now nothing but bitterness; sorrow and misery fill a heart which imagined that it was in possession of happiness; the curse which is indissolubly attached to sin, is the only heritage of him who promised himself so much enjoyment. Never is a man more sadly disabused or more miserable in himself, than when he has just committed an action condemned by the law of his God, unless, at least, he be sunk in demoralization to the level of the devils, whose cursed lot it is to rejoice in evil.

But such could not have been the state of the first man and his unhappy companion; they are about to bear, as their first punishment, all the shame of their sin. Their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked. They knew! .... but did they not know it before? Doubtless; but as "to the defiled, nothing is pure, so to the pure, all things are pure." The words of Genesis which immediately precede the history of the fall, afford us an explanation of these, and describe to us better than any thing else, the perfect innocence and purity of primitive man: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed." Like truth, which has been represented naked, to give us an idea of the purity of its attractions, our first parents, until sin had poured over them its poison, saw in the majestic beauty of person, with which God had endowed them, no motive for shame. And this is the feature of the Divine image, which wen trace most faithfully in the young child, which has not yet had the misfortune to feel the seeds of that corruption which is natural to us, deve-⠀ lope themselves within him, and whose purity and innocence sin has not yet withered by

its impure breath. What a charm does this ignorance of evil, which keeps aloof shame, the offspring of sin, shed over infancy! Why should the tender infant, whom you love to press to your heart, be ashamed of its nudity? It has not yet sinned! Oh! who has not regretted those days of childhood, the remembrance of which still sometimes returns to soothe the miseries inseparable from a world which lieth in wickedness! Who has not shed bitter tears over the loss of that ignorance of evil, which allowed us to indulge, without distrust and with happy feelings, in enjoyments in which, at a later period, we find at every step the poison of sin!

Man, as he came forth from the hands of his God, possessed this innocence, this purity of heart, which nothing had as yet sullied. Perhaps also the body, with which God had clothed him, partook of the glory and beauty of the Divine image which adorned his soul; the Father of lights had perhaps invested with a halo of celestial brightness the creature of His love." He had crowned him," the Scripture tells us, "with glory and honour." The "glorious body," with which the elect of God