him immediately on his receiving the breath of life? Imagine his state. Called suddenly into being, he was placed in a scene where all was new, wonderful and astonishing;-the more so, in that he had been placed in it in the full perfection of all his faculties, without, as in ourselves, any gradual growth of familiarity with the objects by which he was surrounded. Surely his mind at first would be confused with their multiplicity and variety. His attention would be unsettled. His eye would long wander from object to object, each beautiful and brilliant; each equally surprising to his mind, and each, at first, equally unknown alike in use, nature and destination. Would not some interval be given, in which at least he might become accustomed to outward objects; and might learn their properties and qualities, before his mind should be taught the nature of abstract laws of such tremendous import? However gifted and acted on by a divine wisdom, he must still have gained his knowledge of the various works of creation in succession. Raise his powers to any height that you will, he could not, consistently with his character as a man, have known the properties of animate and inanimate nature, before they were presented to him. Let it be granted that as soon as he saw the external form, he knew every combination of their internal qualities by intuition, as by a flash of light, his knowledge must still have been acquired by successive steps; he must have known them still object by object; and it seems difficult indeed to believe that abstract ideas, laws, blessings, pains, and penalties, should be forced upon his attention before it became

familiarized with the uses and designs of outward things. But more than this;-could they be adequately comprehended without a miracle? without such a preternatural enlightenment of his intellect, that he should be able to judge of things before he had experienced them, with the same truth and clearness as after they had been tried? The law, upon which the fate of the world depended, was a prohibition to abstain from eating a certain fruit. Let now this prohibition be taken under its most simple form; or to meet the argument in every point, let it stand as a symbol for any of those sins which men are sometimes desirous of attributing to it-(the more complicated, the more forcible to our views,) but in either case, he must have gained some knowledge of the mode and reasoned on the effect, and this must have taken up time,-in order to arrive at any just conclusions. If, for instance, the sin consisted in tasting a particular fruit, he must have tasted other fruits to discriminate between their flavor, and feel that some were far more desirable than others, before he could have adequately comprehended the full results of an abstract law, which depended so much on the fact of some fruits being so much more the objects of desire than others. If again, the sin, divested of its outward emblem, consisted, as men have sometimes thought, in idolatry,-he must have offered praise and adoration to the true God, before he could either have adequately understood its force, or even known what idolatry, in any of its forms, could have meant. Not that it is to be imagined, that Adam existed at all, without the knowledge of God. Doubtless his

communion with the Deity began at the moment of his birth. We learn this fact incontestably from Moses. Brought into life by the immediate hand of God, we cannot believe that his mind ceased for a moment to be filled with ideas of his Creator's praise, munificence and goodness to him. That inference, from his very perfection, seems inevitable; and it is not to be believed but that God incessantly acted upon and opened his mind to the reception of Truth, and the relative position between Man and his Creator, as soon as he entered Paradise; but it may yet be enquired, without interference with that belief, whether a longer time than the first few hours of the sixth day were not necessary to the development and perfect understanding events so grand, so complicated, and so appalling in their effects.

Scarcely, however, has his mind received these impressions, and become conversant with the true glory of the Almighty, not only as his Creator but in the light of his Protector and his Judge, than the various races of animals and birds, which like himself, had been fashioned from the dust, impelled by a divine impulse, passed successively before him, in order that he might affix names to them. We take this act, at the present moment, chiefly as a question of time. The language of Moses on this point is remarkably explicit. He states that "out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam; and Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field." Now we are well assured that the design

of this survey was not merely that names should be affixed to them, but to convince him that he was so completely superior to the other orders of creation, so much their lord and ruler, so differently constituted in every particular, that "no help meet for him" could be found among their numbers. Their names therefore-as is the case in the Hebrew and in all the ancient oriental languages-were not affixed by hazard or caprice, but responded to their nature and qualities. As each pair met his eye their nature opened upon his mind; he caught by inspiration their characteristic features, and embodied them in their name. I have no idea whatever, individually, that this formal process was undergone in reality by Adam; but mention it as the most favourable to the views of those who cling to the opinion that all animals were named on the sixth day. It seems far more compatible with truth that Adam should have named them as any remarkable form, trait or habit met his view, and that the phrase, that God brought them unto him should apply to the indwelling of all creation within the region of Paradise. But under any circumstances this must have been a slow and deliberate process. Their qualities were to live afterwards in his remembrance; and his mind must have been employed deeply in the subject. It was therefore a work of reflection: the ideas received from one pair as they receded must have sunk into his mind, before another came in sight to be subjected to the same procedure and to give the same impression. Under any circumstances, then, we repeat, this seems incompatible with that rapid and hurried

passage which the enclosure of that labour within the sixth day compels us to resort to.

It is difficult-perhaps dangerous-to calculate the numbers which must have thus passed. But to give the greatest latitude that we can to mixed species, and to reduce the primitive animals to the smallest possible circle, they must still have amounted to a vast number. There is not the slightest vestige of evidence, that any have been created since the birth of Adam; and the language of Moses, as we have observed, is too precise, and the object of it too remarkable, to admit the supposition that any of the existing species did not render an instinctive homage to their future ruler by appearing in his presence in Eden. How shall we say that a work like this did not consume time?

But the events of the day are not yet closed. The animal creation having been reviewed, and no help having been found for him; remaining the acknowledged lord of all; gifted with speech and reason, though with no one with whom he can interchange his thoughts; solitary, though surrounded with life, God causes "a deep sleep to fall on him and he slept." The expression itself is singular; and indicative, in its very terms, of a long state of unconsciousness; during which it pleased the Almighty to produce and form Eve from the side of Adam. The succeeding verses also show, that God represented to his mind in a vision the work that he had performed, so that, on his awaking, he understood the nature of that mystic union by which man was said to be one with his wife. "This now is bone of my