it can conceive.

We have not the slightest reason to doubt, that the animal mind has been lowered to the animal form.

The serpent race might have been extinguished at the moment of the crime; as many of the antediluvian animals unquestionably have been in the Deluge; and yet it might be of signal value to early, and to all, mankind, that so striking a remembrancer of that crime, and so striking an anticipation of the final vanquisher of the evil one, should be kept in existence; that wherever, in field or forest, the tiller of the ground saw a serpent, he should see, in the degradation of a creature, once of such intelligence, gentleness, and beauty, into an object of such instinctive loathing, and mortal danger; a living evidence of the guilt by which Paradise was lost to man'.

1

Bishop Horsley, after Warburton, asks, "Why did not Moses say at once that the serpent was Satan?" and answers, that he suppressed the name through fear of encouraging the serpent worship then prevalent in the East. But this is rash dealing with Scripture. It takes for granted that the writer of the Pentateuch might insert or suppress whatever fact he pleased. In other words, that he might model the history according to his own conceptions. In this case what becomes of its inspiration?

A reason will be given, as the volume advances, why the serpent alone was spoken of—a reason referring to the general system of Revelation, and of which Moses uninspired could have known nothing; yet the close adaptation of his history to which, shows that the writer must have been a passive instrument in a mightier hand.

M

CHAPTER IX.

THE TREE OF LIFE.

THAT the power of giving perpetual life should exist in the fruit of a tree', has been made the subject of violent question. Yet, what does human science prove to the contrary? What is known of the principle of life? Nothing. And what can qualify this utter ignorance, to decide against the plain declaration of the record? or, are we not daily witnesses of powers in the vegetable world, only next in extent, and altogether as much out of the pale of human explanation? What might be the impressions made on an intelligent observer witnessing, for the first time, the action of some of the simplest products of the earth?

Let us conceive him present at a paroxysm of fever. He sees an agony of disease, the

1 The learned Kennicott labours with great assiduity to escape the supposed difficulties of the "tree of life."-(Two Dissertations.) He applies the name to the whole class of trees, and concludes that their general use as food, was the source of the name. But this is incompatible with the fact that Adam had not eaten of the tree, and with his expulsion to prevent his eating of it. The conjecture is untenable.

countenance changed, the brain bewildered, the frame convulsed by preternatural force or worn by mortal exhaustion; the man palpably sinking into the grave.-Then comes the all but miracle: a few scrapings of the rind of a tree are poured into the dying lips, and the disease flies; life shoots again through the frame; the possession of the faculties, the vigour of nerve and muscle, the living countenance, the composure of mind, all are there once more: the man is snatched from the tomb!

Or what could more amply justify the astonishment of such a spectator, than the common effects of the vegetable poisons? Their sudden seizure of the very founts of life, and the subtilty and diversity of that seizure; their unaccountable powers of alike dissolving and stagnating; of scorching and chilling; of stimulating and numbing; their turning the blood alternately into ice, into water, into flame !

Or, passing from those fierce influences, (which yet, in a more advanced stage of science, will probably be found among the noblest repellants of disease) to the common stimulants; how little could he expect to find, in the simple and singularly nutritious ear of corn, powers capable of subverting every habit, feeling, and faculty of man; of infatuating the wise, inflaming the prudent, and degrading the whole manliness and dignity of our being into a mass of profligate imbecility.

Or, who that laid the seed-vessel of the poppy before him, could be heard, without a strong tinge of incredulity, in the assertion; that this weedy, and common encumbrance of the field possessed not merely the most singular mastery over the frame, the strangely antagonist powers of animating the nerves, and chaining them up in total insensibility, of soothing disease and extinguishing life; but, that it reached the finest recesses of the mind; alternately startling the imagination with shapes of terror, and filling the sleeping or the waking dream with a world of magnificent fiction.

But the frame which resists disease, yields to time. Old age comes; and the subject of all those influences and revivals goes down to the grave. Still, the powers of the vegetable world are not yet outstripped; the infusion of a common seed arrests nature, even in that process in which she is deemed most irresistible; says to decay, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther!" and holds every limb, feature, and fibre of the dead, in the completeness of the living form, for hundreds or for thousands of years!

Habit diminishes only unreasoning wonder. To the philosopher, the support of the human frame by food for a day, is as profound a problem as its support for a century, or for ever; it belongs to a chemistry which evades even conjecture; and leaves him, if he be a fool, to illume his vanity by

some new light of scepticism; or, if he be wise, to bow down with new reverence before the exhaustless wisdom of the Lord of nature.

The words in which the sentence of exile was passed, appear to contain a mixture of that lofty scorn 1 which was due to baffled pride; and of that compassionate wisdom which is a characteristic of the Deity. "Behold, man is become as one of us, to know good and evil," was originally the language, not of the Deity, but of the tempter. And its statement by the Judge may not imply more than the recapitulation of the crime from the tribunal; it cannot imply that man had actually made an advance towards the nature of the Godhead, for the direct result was the actual degradation of his own. The sentence seems contemptuous, alike of the deceiver and of the deceived.Behold, what man has obtained by the temptation of equalling God! But mercy here intervenes; and, for the purpose of preventing a new evil arising from a new exercise of his arrogance and presumption, he is to be removed from the tree of immortality. "And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever;" "therefore God sent them

'Glass. Philolog. Sac. 905.