which arise from neglecting or depraved mothers, these must be as soothing as those of all young animals seem to be; with the addition of those maternal endearments and commingling sensibilities, which it is the privilege of the human race only to participate. All these gratifications are hourly increased, as the senses begin to attend to and to perceive the external things which affect it; for it is a law of our intellectual nature, that every new sensation is a pleasure. Even pain, in its novelty, from its exciting operation, is not wholly disagreeable, if it be not too severe nor too continuous; and when it is so, its departure causes a sense of positive enjoyment to succeed to it, merely from its absence. This I have repeatedly experienced. But with the exception of what is of the painful kind, the continual occurrence of fresh impressions, unknown before, which, from a world where every thing is new to it, as it begins to be acquainted with it, are continually occurring to the growing child, must make that state of its being a happy era. We see this effect continually before us. Who is so happy as the self-amusing child that is tolerably well brought up? Its hours glide in playful comfort. It seems to feel life, as the ascending lark and the sportive insect do, to be an instinctive blessing Left to itself, and permitted to pursue its own little fancies and activities, it is happy, because it exists and moves; for we are so formed, that motion, as well as sensation, is pleasurable to us.

Old age is querulous. It is one of its defects at times to be so; but let not this occasional weakness deceive you. Age suffers often from calamities which it has brought upon itself, and from many splenetic feelings, which it might relinquish if it chose. But you may be assured that, naturally, it has new gratifications of its own, which fully balance those of earlier days, and which, if cultivated, would carry on the stream of happiness to its grave. If the life has been rightly employed, it will also have the visioned recollections of its preceding comforts, to enhance the pleasures which it is actually enjoying.*

* On this last period of life my own experience is, in the 67th year of my age, that, notwithstanding ailments, infirmities, and the privations which they occasion, it is just as happy as all the preceding seasons were, though in a different way. So happy, as to cause no regret that they have passed, and no desire to exchange what is for what has

The result of both our reasoning and our experience is, if we act properly ourselves, and keep a right judgment within us, as well as becoming habits, that each period has and brings its own felicities; and that it will be the fault of human mismanagement, not of created nature and its plan, if infancy, childhood, youth, maturity, and old age, be not a series of diversified pleasures: each period having its own best suiting and wisely appointed ones, and altogether composing a noble banquet of rational happiness, partly sensorial, partly moral, and partly intellectual, terminating, if we shall so choose, with that which is divine, and which is meant, ultimately, to be superior to every other.

LETTER XII.

Paradise-State of Adam and Eve-The Divine Command-The Necessity of such Tuition-Reasons for its Imposition.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

HAVING taken this survey of the system of being which our Creator devised and selected to be that of the human nature which he chose to place on this our globe; and of its intended qualities, and of the provisions which he made for its moral and intellectual formation while here; let us now proceed to consider the actual execution of his interesting design, in the experienced history of our thus favoured race.

It was his will, that our order of being should begin with two parents, one of each of the sexes already alluded to, and that from these, in an ever-multiplying series of productions, by a continued succession of new generations, all that quantity of human beings should issue, which have since constituted the human population. It was also his plan, that these two originating ancestors should begin their existence in a place, in a state, and under circumstances, which would not occur to any of their descendants, and which would be but a temporary condition to themselves, and that of a very brief duration.

been. If youth has hopes, and prospects, and wishes that enchant it, age has no inferiority even in this respect.

The abode appointed for their first residence and experience was a selected portion of the earth, whose exact site, from the subsequent changes of its surface, cannot now be satisfactorily ascertained. It had been prepared to be a beautiful garden, where every thing that was pleasant to the eye and gratifying to the taste was provided to give delight to their young sensibilities. The abundant produce made labour unnecessary, and precluded all care or inquiry about subsistence. Their food was everywhere about them, as nature's spontaneous produce. Their daily life was the perfection of human happiness on earth, as far as terrestrial things and bodily effects could cause it. Every sensorial enjoyment; agreeable feelings; mutual affection; serene minds; the absence of all anxiety; ignorance of all that was evil; lovely objects of sight; interesting scenery; their own ever-gladdened spirits; the gentle activities of their limbs and movements; exercise without fatigue, and selfchosen occupations, without need or compulsion; interchange of thought and wishes; innocent gayety; concurring sympathies; the delights of young knowledge and conver sation ever varying, yet ever pleasing, and always kind and courteous, were those elements of gratification which must have attached to the sweetly passing hours a joyous consciousness of happy existence, and imparted a soothing excitement of intellectual exhilaration. Such means of rational, sportive, and tender enjoyment, must have caused the mutually admiring and heart-united pair to be the image of their God in his felicity, as they were meant to be trained to be, and as all human nature will finally be led to be, in spirit, feeling, and temper; in its intellectual improvements, and in highly celestialized principle and character.

Such was the first state of mankind, and such will be their ultimate condition in their consummated formation; but such could not be their durable condition, anterior to the acquired completion of their nature. The child cannot be the man in its infancy, but must progressively grow into the maturity which constitutes manhood. This principle prevails in all earthly nature. The vegetating seed cannot be the beauteous flower, nor the valuable fruit, which its living principle is ordained to form, and will be always acting to compose; but for the production of which, the intermediate process, and all the assisting causes, must indispensably inVOL. II.-R

tervene. All animal frames thus expand from their embryo state into their complete strength and figure. What is true as to all that is material and bodily, is pre-eminently true of human nature, in that attainable beauty, richness, and sublimity which it has the capacity to reach, and is invited to aspire to. But its perfection is too grand and too multifarious, and consists of too many elements, to be early or hastily effected. Many ages, a very complicated process, and a continued series of adapted progression, must first ensue and the fit process must be gone through, and must have its due and successive operations, before the ennobling result can be accomplished among us.

Adam and Eve were but the commencement of the divine economy of human existence. They were to its ultimate perfection what the germinating seed is to the lofty forest. They could no more be what perfected human nature is meant to be and will become, than their babes at the birth could be as large, mature, and dignified as themselves. We ourselves are but in a stage, though a considerably advanced one, of this evolving series of human progression. But Adam and Eve could no more, in their paradise, be what their cultivated descendants are now, than these can transform their fields and cities into a garden of Eden. The first state of Adam and Eve was, therefore, but their first condition. This would change as they changed, and as all numan life necessarily alters to every one, as his individual age advances, from his young paradise in his mother's arms and fondling love, to all the varying scenes of a very different nd shifting nature, which accompany the after periods of his diversified life.

One circumstance seems obvious to us, when we reflect on the position of our first ancestors; and this is, that their continuation in this desirable abode of beauty and delight, or at least the continuity of their happiness in it and from it. could not but be dependant on the right use they should make of all their faculties, limbs, powers, and senses. These are too great, too many, too excitable, and too pleasurable, not to need the knowledge and the habit of their due and beneficial regulation. This fact all human experience attests. We perceive its truth every day in ourselves. We must never do whatever we can, or all that we should like to do; nor could any intelligent being, living anywhere with others,

exert or have such a license. No two creatures of mind and sensitivity could live together without mutual self-constraint. In human beings, and in our human world, this truth is incontestable.

A wrong, an injudicious, an unregulated use of our body, or of external things, is at this moment as incompatible with health, comfort, or character, to any one, as it was to Adam and Eve, even in their paradise. The first pair had to be as selecting, careful, and self-governed in their enjoyments and conduct, as every human being who has since issued from them, has found it necessary to be.

But as they were the first beings of the human form and spirit that had ever lived, they had no anterior experience, no preceding example, no human reasonings of wise predecessors, by which they could be assisted or directed. They could have no teacher but One. They had to learn all the regulations, and restrictions, and modifications of thought and feeling, which they would have to observe, from Him who had framed them and nature; and who only knew what it was expedient that they should do, and what it was his will that they should be. But to be so instructed and benefited by him, they must obey his counsels and precepts, and be implicitly and continuously guided by him. This was essential to their wellbeing. His tuition, their obedience, and their permanent happiness, were three points which could not be separated from each other; and of these, the obedience could not but be the primary and the fundamental one, as even the tuition would be useless without it.

Their permanent enjoyment of their beauteous paradise was, therefore, from the outset, made dependant on one condition-that condition on which the due formation and right conduct of all human beings must ever depend—and this was, that they should live in constant obedience to their Creator, and according to the regulations which he should suggest. It was impossible for them to preserve their wellbeing, to avoid what would be painful and detrimental, to enjoy a succession of uninterrupted good, and to do nothing that was evil or that would cause it, without receiving his counsels and directions, nor without steadily and implicitly living in continual conformity to them. Utterly ignorant at first of every thing, and having to acquire the knowledge of whatever there was to know by gradual sensations as these