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"That Adam should not have died (says the learned and pious Bishop Bull) if he had not sinned, is manifestly the doctrine of Scripture." And in another passage he adds,

"Let it once be granted, that man if he had continued obedient, should have enjoyed an everlasting life, any man of reason that shall more closely consider the matter, will presently collect that this life should not, could not in any congruity be perpetuated in the earthly paradise, and therefore the man was, in the design of God, after a certain period of time to have been translated to a higher state, i. e. a celestial bliss."*

The curse pronounced upon the ground seems to imply, a diminished excellency, and diminished abundance of its spontaneous fruits; an increased capacity for the multiplication of plants noxious to culture, and requiring to be controlled by human labour; and an indispensable necessity for toil and the sweat of his brow, as the sole condition, on which the productions of the earth were thenceforth to be attainable by man.

• Discourse on the State of Man before the Fall.

Merciful adaptations these to the fallen and degraded condition of him who had forfeited his first and high estate in Paradise,-to him and his posterity who had become thenceforth prone to evil continually, and whose greatest safe-guard from the sins which beset and tempt on every side the idle and unoccupied, would thenceforth be found in that salutary necessity for healthful labour and innocent occupation, which the culture of the earth affords, and requires of every one that will reap its fruits.

But had Adam never fallen, it does not appear that Paradise would have been his final and eternal resting-place; nor, during his short abode therein, was he exempt from duties any more than from temptation. The very letter of the text informs us that he was placed there only as in a state of probation, under one tremendous prohibition whereby God would make trial of his obedience, and charged with his appointed duties to dress the garden and to keep it; to walk therein as in a place of trust and responsibility, his future condition depending on his

demeanour in this first but not final stage of his

existence.

Under no imaginable condition are we taught to contemplate an earthly Paradise as the enduring abode of the first created man, or of the countless myriads of his posterity. If we may dare to speculate on so mysterious a subject, we may reasonably conjecture, that had Adam never fallen, he and his descendants might have been spared the agonies of death, and its usual forerunners, pain, sickness, and decay, both of the bodily and mental powers, and might have been removed, like Enoch, in the fulness of his faculties, by translation, to some more exalted state of being in another world; but Scripture tells us not that man would in any

"The never-ending life of happiness promised to our first parents, if they had continued obedient, and grown up to perfection under that economy wherein they were placed, should not have been continued in the earthly Paradise, but only have commenced there, and been perpetuated in a higher state; that is to say, after such a trial of their obedience as should seem sufficient to the Divine wisdom, they should have been translated from earth to heaven."-Bishop Bull's Discourse on the State of Man before the Fall.

case have had an abiding city upon earth, and the physical conditions of the human frame, no less than those of the world itself, and of the whole animal and vegetable creation, are all in harmonious adaptation to the temporary uses of a fleeting, and transitory state — “a recurring cycle of production, growth, decay, and death."

Under this dispensation, which includes, without exception, every creature that has been placed on earth, we see the essence of life in each individual of every race to consist of an unceasing succession of bodily changes, from the moment of birth to that of dissolution; whilst the permanency of species is maintained by a perpetual substitution of new individuals, the production and care of which, is, next to self-preservation, the most important function provided for in the physical structure of the entire animal and vegetable creation. From this universal condition of all organic beings upon earth, man himself has no exemption,-to him, as to every thing around him, the inevitable termination of life is

death.

"As of the green leaves on a thick tree, some fall and some grow; so is the generation of flesh and blood, one cometh to an end and another is born."* "The covenant from the beginning is, Thou shalt die the death."

Before we close this subject, we should not omit to notice that some of the sublime passages in Isaiah which describe the peaceful blessedness and tranquillity of the kingdom of the Messiah, are not unfrequently referred to in support of the opinion, that before the fall of man, the races of carnivorous beasts may have had instincts and organizations different from those they now possess-that the lion might literally have "eaten straw like the ox" -and that neither he nor his destructive associates might have entered then upon their present important offices in the economy of nature, as dispensers of relief by death to the aged, and decrepid, and diseased among the weaker herbivorous tribes, whose excessive increase it is their function to controul.

I will not here discuss what I think the reason* Ecclus. xiv. 18.

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