chinery. These three important endowments are Freedom, Rationality, and Desire for knowledge-reason to determine, freedom to act, and curiosity to know. Without these endowments, man could never be elevated With them, he is a free,

above the beasts that perish. rational, and progressive being. These three endowments, as given by God, are all right. And though, from the very nature of these endowments, man may abuse them and become depraved, yet they are positive necessities of his being. And the possibility of abusing them and falling into evil exists in the possibility of using them and rising into heavenly knowledge and happiness. In the freedom and ability to do right are necessarily involved the freedom and ability to do wrong. But no man, in the exercise of the freedom which God has given him, is obliged to do what he knows to be wrong. In the truth, by which he sees the wrong, God gives him the power to resist the temptation and do right, if he will look to the Lord and make the effort which he is free to do. Thus everything necessary for man's salvation is carefully provided by the Lord.

Man was not obliged to fall. God did not desire him to fall, for He commanded him not to eat of the knowledge of evil; or, in other words, not to know evil and make it his good, by practising it, and thus appropriating it to his affections. God told him that if he did eat of it

he would surely die. The forbidden fruit was the same that is now forbidden in the Decalogue.

Nor did man intend to fall. He could not have had any such desire at first, for it would have been evil. Therefore, the fall must have been imperceptibly slow at first. Man, in the exercise of his curiosity to know new things, gradually overreached the true line of virtue and

justice, in such slight degrees as not to be aware that he was really diverging from the course of truth and righteousness. He was young and ambitious, with everything to learn, and a desire to know everything: with no historic paths or beaten tracks of life before him; no symbols of vice to warn him of his danger, nor examples of depravity to show him his faults. Thus he went on, gradually falling from the love of good to the love of evil.

This fall may be illustrated in many ways. A man, ignorant of the quality of the poppy, while examining, tasting, and testing its medicinal properties, and its influence upon the human system, may gradually obtain, by habit, an artificial relish for it which God did not give him, and, following up the growing demands of a disordered appetite, he eventually destroys his physical existence by it and so of antimony and alcohol. Thus, without any relish implanted in his nature for these poisons, he by habit obtains a love for what is destructive of physical order and happiness. Precisely so could the people of the primeval age, without any inherent tendencies to evil, obtain a love for that which is destructive of spiritual order and happiness. For illustration: the inebriate is out of alcohol: the voracious appetite loudly demands it. The love of self and self-gratification-the very head of the serpent-is determined to have it at any cost. But the circumstances are such that it cannot be obtained without stealing it. The better judgment sees the injustice of the theft; but the serpent's demands are imperious, and the judgment finally yields; and the Divine command is broken-the soul has eaten of the forbidden fruit. And the next time it will be broken more easily. Thus he yields to the bite of the serpent, whose

tooth he had poisoned by his own indulgence, in permițting it to run wild when he might have controlled it.

Thus the love of evil, brought on by gradually vitiating the orderly demands of mind and body, is that old serpent the Devil, who " as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour." And is not this the great enemy of mankind? What evil or crime was ever committed that this devil did not do? Look at the wretch in human form, with this devil in the midst of his depraved and morbid appetites of soul and body! What else have we so much to fear? His hand is pollution to everything hetouches.

These serpents of the human heart are the evils to which the Saviour alludes when He says He will give His disciples "power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy." They had no more power over the snakes of the earth than other people. But over the serpent of the mind they had power from the Lord. Paul to the Corinthians says, 'I fear, lest, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtlety, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." Here Paul is afraid that the minds of his disciples will be corrupted as the serpent beguiled Eve, or in the same way that she was beguiled. This is proof positive that Paul did not suppose that any natural serpent tempted Eve. For it.cannot be believed that Paul was afraid that the snakes of this earth would lead his disciples into sin. No: it was their sinful desires to gratify the wayward demands of the heart, that Paul was afraid of.

Thus, immediately after the fall, the Saviour was promised to bruise the serpent's head, or the love of self. This work was the great object of His mission. It is no

where recorded that He killed a snake. When He came in the flesh the kingdom of Satan, or of the serpent, ruled on earth. Christ came to destroy the works of the devil in the human heart, and establish His own kingdom there. When the serpent rules, the whole mind is in disorder. When Christ rules, all is happiness and peace.

CHAPTER IV.

ACTION AND REACTION: OR, GOOD AND ITS REWARDS; EVIL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

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THE Lord, in His Word, says to us, "Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again." (Matt. vii, 1, 2.) He says, give, and it shall be given unto you:" that according to what we sow we shall reap: that "the soul that sinneth, it shall die:" that "the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him." (Ezek. xviii, 20.)

The spirit and life of these passages bring before us an eternal law, which is as reliable and certain, in spiritual things, as that of action and reaction is, in natural things. We know that the earth bears as hard against the man who stands upon it, as he does against the earth, and by this means he can walk. And this is but a natural illustration of a higher law which appertains to spiritual things with equal certainty. And while this law, in the natural plane, pervades the universe of matter; and no machinery could move, and nothing could exist without it; so, in the spiritual plane, it pervades the universe of mind, and