not purchased the fatal knowledge. They could therefore, even in idea, conceive but one sin, the sin of palpable disobedience to a command of God; and this command attached to but one object. Nay more, the presence of the Almighty daily before their eyes, must have imparted awe to the proposition, and promptness to their obedience. Shall then the cavils of narrow minded man presume to arraign the wisdom of the Almighty, in imposing a trial; not for its severity, not for its hardships, not for its cruelty; but for its ease, for its mildness, for its mercy: not for the difficulty of obeying, but of transgressing it. From our extended knowledge of human ill, we can all figure to ourselves trials much more severe, prohibitions much more numerous, attended by temptations, which from the previous state of the passions, are much more irresistible. It is then at the very facility of obedience that we revolt. The mind of man cannot adequately explore the mercies of God; the more we contemplate them, the more infinite do they appear. What then could have suggested the breach of so simple and so easy an injunction? Not a natural appetite, but a moral motive: though the trial, by its very simplicity, shewed the benevolence of God, it was yet of a very searching and probing nature, and thereby evinced the wisdom of him who imposed it. It was to try the un

But

derstanding, the temper, the whole moral frame of the creature whom he had made in the image of his own mighty mind. "Eat," says the tempter," of the tree, and your eyes shall be opened; ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil;" or in other words, ye shall find that ye have been deceived by God; ye shall be no longer vassals of his power, or the creatures of his bounty; this God knoweth, and to prevent your independence and continue your servitude, he hath placed upon you this prohibition. How many points now of our moral nature, must these considerations have affected. Even these very propositions shewed how high in the scale of intellect and of reason man was created. the intellect and reason which the very temptation supposes, ought and might with the greatest facility, have resisted the assault. Man fell indeed by the fraud of the tempter, but it was a fraud which every consideration of present happiness, of gratitude, of obedience, nay even of the very threat of the Almighty, ought to have detected and withstood. The offence was not from ignorance, or from negligence; it was the result of that contumacious pride, that faithless ingratitude, which induced them, and their guilty and lapsed posterity since, to transfer their allegiance from their bounteous and gracious bene factor, to the adversary, the tormentor, and the

Blessed indeed

destroyer of the human race. would have been our first parents, had they endured the temptation. The tree of life might have been theirs and their children for ever. Like Enoch of old, they might have been translated, without sin, without sorrow, and without death.

SERMON VIII.

JAMES i. 12.

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation; for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath prepared for them that love him.

IN how much wisdom and benevolence the trial of our first parents was ordained, it was my endeavour in the concluding part of my last discourse to shew. The light which we derive from the circumstances attending their fall is very considerable, and will enable us much more clearly to comprehend the nature of that more extended probation, to which we, their children, are exposed.

In the first place it will remind us, that we are degraded creatures, and that we are not in that state for which we were originally intended. In most of our speculations upon human nature, this is a circumstance which we generally forget to take into consideration. God created man in the image of his own perfection; by an exercise

of the free will, with which his Maker had endowed him, man fell, and by his fall became subject to the curse, which the Almighty had threatened as the consequence of his disobedience. And in this point of view the analogy between the natural and the moral world, is a very remarkable one; "Cursed be the ground," said the Almighty, "for thy sake." The appearance of all things around us is decidedly penal. This is a point which did not escape the notice of the heathens themselves. Hence the legends which we trace among them, of a golden age when the earth freely gave its fruits to man, without labour, and without disappointment. Both with regard to ourselves and the earth which we inhabit, there is a decided frustration of purpose. From the order, the fertility, and the beauty which yet remain, we are convinced that when the Almighty saw every thing that he had made, "behold it was very good." The storms and tempests which blast the labours of man, the accidents and diseases which shatter his frame; are the daily signals of a descending curse. So in the human soul, many are the tokens yet remaining of primeval innocence, while at the same time the malignant passions by which it is agitated, and the selfish propensities by which it is debased, bear an undeniable testimony to the contagious entailment of our first parents' crime