self; and afforded to the great truth of God concerning the tree of life, an else unattained experimental demonstration, by a slip in the dark tactics of hell, as ruinous to him, as glorious to God, as that by which he let into death and the grave their very conqueror, and by them into resurrection else ungotten, that Prince of Life who through death alone could live and conquer. What Satan said of God's knowledge was true. But it was only half the truth. By the remainder, the tree of life was reserved intangible to mortal hand, and they who vainly sought its substance, lost its presence.

Thus instructed by Satan to outwit the Godhead, and baited by mere sensual enjoyment, our parents ate and died. Their eyes were opened, alas! too surely. They knew good and evil, but God would not suffer the good to be thus obtained at the expense of Christ. We are informed that before their fall, Adam and Eve were naked, and not ashamed (Gen. ii. 25.); a state typical of that glorious manifestation which yet awaits the second Adam and his Eve the church. But the first effect of the opening of their eyes by eating of the tree was, a depraved perception of their state, and an entirely ignorant dissatisfaction with God's original appointment, under which a good unconsciousness excluded shame (Gen. iii. 7. 11.). The careful observer cannot fail to mark here how closely the type runs parallel to the antitype. For, if the original nakedness of our first parents express the eternal manifestation of Christ and his then united church in victory and glory and life during the eternal sabbath of redeemed creation, and if the death in which the fall resulted involve an absolute dereliction of the promised inheritance of the saints in light, then it is not a little instructive to observe that the very first act of the fallen creature was a real disavowal in type of that unashamed nakedness which was in antitype disavowed at the fall itself. Our first parents with depraved perversion of mind, first rejected the state of eternal life, and then rejected its symbol, as things not in themselves shameful, but which the fallen creature was ashamed to possess or avow. Their shame thus materially set forth was just the reverse of that full unashamedness which is in Christ, just the essence of darkness, defilement, distress, and despair—a state which the sequel powerfully illustrates. In Eden of old the presence of God was a sensible object, but sin made that presence hateful and terrible. Nakedness unashamed in the sight of God remained unchangeably the same glorious thing as ever, but it was no glorious thing to creatures become sinful; on the contrary, it is just their very torture and shame. Fallen Adam and his spouse, although they courted the concealment of girdles, found, as the wicked now find, and shall yet unutterably feel, that, before the Searcher of hearts no human aid or device can afford any concealment to

the shame, any balm to the torture, any balance to the heavy account of sin, and that nothing short of death in the death of Christ, the only well-beloved Son of man (or Adam or earth) and life in his resurrection, can give boldness at his coming and in his kingdom. As a perfect knowledge of unconcealable nakedness in the Divine presence, a knowledge, the least glimpse of which now gives such pain to the wicked, will form a large element in the consummate woe of those who shall be for ever tormented before God and his holy angels, so was the presence of God an intolerable thing to Adam and Eve, after they had come to be ashamed of the type of that glorious manifestation which is the hope of our calling. The residence of that presence in the type of paradise only rendered it the more oppressive, and, nothing re-assured, be it observed, by their continuance in Eden after the performance of disobedience, they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord, and disclosed in their excuse for doing so, the character of their offence and altered state.

The questions put by the Lord to the pair who had so sinned against him, resulted in the ascription of the foul tragedy to the original device of the serpent; and for this there was an obvious reason, because had the work of fall originated with man, on man must have fallen the destructive part of the work of Christ : whereas, the tracing of the crime back to the serpent brought upon him the determination of God's holy wrath, and leaving fallen man only the exponent of Satan's desolating work, transferred the destruction from man to the devil, and harmonized this eternal ruin, and the destruction of his works by Christ, with the redemption of that nature on which Satan had done so foul a work, but which the Word should, by entrance into it, glorify for ever; and with the employment of that nature which Satan had ruined, in the overthrow of Satan's self.- To him had been directed no legislation in Eden; on his obedience to the prohibition there had been no claim; of his general obedience there was no hope; his disobedience was no new thing, which demanded an account. He was already reserved unto eternal chains and torment. He was from the beginning the liar, and the father of all lies; the accuser, the betrayer; his must have been an evil presence; and, therefore, the mere ascertainment that the fall was his work, was reason sufficient why he had done it.

We have now considered, in the transaction which issued in the eating of the tree of knowledge, the act of fall; and we have also witnessed in the extraordinary and sorely altered conduct of our first parents, immediately on partaking of the tree of knowledge; their symbolic rejection of the glory to come; their utter aversion from God; their utter terror in his presence; the literal and immediate fulfilment, and commenced operation

of that tremendous sanction which awaited their most wanton and reckless disobedience. Spiritual death overtook them in the very day of eating; and the mention of natural death subsequently made in the address to Adamı (Gen. iii. 19.) is no new and separate sentence diverse from that formerly denounced by way of threatening (Gen. ii. 17.), and exemplified ere the garden lost its former owners (Gen. iii. 8.); but is only the assumption of the arrival of that natural death which forms a constituent part of the total death, originally threatened against, and instantly felt through sin.

The remainder of the chapter consists of three great parts; the addresses of God to the three different actors in the melancholy scene; the transactions which intervened between these, and the expulsion from Eden; and lastly, that act of expulsion. The serpent was already an accursed being, and accordingly the sanction of eating the tree, had, along with it, no sanction applicable to the temptation to commit that crime. But as this, his accursed character, arose from deeds not transacted on this earth's platform, it became necessary, that, when his character embodied itself in a tangible form by crime on earth, his curse also should assume a palpable form. The nature of this exhibition of his destiny was of course made to harmonize with the history of redemption. Christ was the great Heir of the universe, and especially of this great earth its metropolis. Satan was the usurper of the earth and of man, creation's lord; and attempted to usurp thereby the tree of life: but the true Heir, at the very fall, defeated that attempt; and has, ever since the fall, and more especially ever since he received at ascension the sealed book of the inheritance, been doing mighty and successive acts in beating down that usurpation. By this continuous defeat the usurper himself is the most keenly cut, the most deeply humiliated; above all cattle, therefore, is he cursed. It is only as a slave over-ruled that he goeth about his dark and supple deeds, on his very belly: and whether we regard the ultimate unprofitableness, and barrenness, of all that Satanic policy which he now so busily plies, only to be the more signally overthrown; or whether we regard his continual downcasting in the dread anticipation of final destruction, at the hands of him in whom devils believe and tremble; true it emphatically is, that he has all the days of his life, either eaten the dust, instead of nourishing food, or licked, as all his children shall do, under the everlasting kingdom of Christ on earth. All this the very following verse confirms: - That Christ is the seed of the woman; the individual, the only seed, who shall do the vast exploit for the universe, is a matter beyond question. thought her first-born, He (Gen. iv. 1.), and even until he came nay even yet among those who believe that he has not yet

Eve

come, it has been the universal hope of every mother, to be the mother of the Great Seed: the seed of Eve; the seed of Abraham; the desire of woman. He alone, of all creatures, is the implacable enemy of Satan: against him alone, and against them, who, because they are his members, cannot be seduced and lost, is directed the unadulterated hate of him, who hateth none whom he can hope to ruin. He is the deliverer of a sore straitened and groaning universe, into the glorious liberty of the children of God. He is the destroyer of the works; the binder, and then the eternal tormentor of the devil; the great counterworker of all his arts, and confounder of all his pretensions; his victor in the midst of weakness; his Judge in the power and glory of the Father. The deeds of the woman's seed are not directed as promises to mankind; but prophesied for the continual dismay of Satan: the bringing in of the Head; the destruction of the chief honour and power of the devil; the final breaking in pieces of the oppressor, for the salvation of the children of the needy (Psalm lxxii. 4.); the imposition of Christ's once bruised heel, and of the feet of all his members, upon the heads of his footstool-enemies; and, especially, of their leader the devil (Rom. xvi. 20.); the destruction of the beast, or Antichrist, in whom stands commissioned all the power of the dragon (Rev. xiii. 2-4.); the consumption and ruin of the wicked one with the breath. (or spirit) of Christ's mouth, and the brightness of his coming (2 Thess. ii. 8.). All these, and many more such synonymes, express one mighty act; the investment of the Heir; the dispossession and disgrace of the usurper, which, from the very fall, has been held over the head of Satan, as the great memento of his end. Accordingly, the thing to be done takes in the narrative, the precedence of the means whereby it should be accomplished. And while we learn that the princes of this world did not know the counsel of God, concerning the ministry of death on the cross, to the victory and glory of Christ, it gives us very awful ideas of the majesty of God, to contemplate the only great act of spite which Satan should be suffered to perform directly against the Son, as singled out to express the very method by which the Son should attain the victory. Satan did indeed bruize the heel of Christ, when he slew him. He could do no more, for he crept as a slave. He thought, ignorantly thought, that even so he had come off the victor. But he who came to do the Father's will, and be obedient unto the death; a death despised for the joy set before him; a death, against the horrors of which his faith armed him; a death from which his prayers for the fulfilment of the Father's covenant raised him; he feared not in the days of evil, when the iniquity of his heels compassed him about (Psalm xlix. 5.); when he was made a curse to redeem us from the

curse, and felt the edge of the law in the hands of Satan; the bruised heel of the one, was but the transit to the bruised head of the other. From the former the one has been redeemed, and now he sits expecting till the Father send him to perform the latter.

The address to the woman, foretold not the fact of her conception, but the sorrow thereof; a sorrow which the individual now feels, pre-eminently above all the animals on whom she has brought it; a sorrow which is now felt by the second Eve, the church, who with the whole irresponsible universe still travaileth in pain together until now, and will travail till her whole sons are begotten from the grave, and the hidden sons of God are made manifest at that glorious era when the New Jerusalem above, the mother of us all, shall come down "as a bride adorned for her husband" (Gen. ii. 17.). Throughout, in the reception of law concerning the tree of knowledge, in the announcement of natural death (Gen. iii. 19.), in the expulsion from Eden; nay, in the very address to herself (Gen. iii. 16.), the woman is made to stand before God judicially, under the headship of the man, the Adam, the generic person of humanity or earthiness. And as it was by the wife that the first Adam was led astray, and by his spouse that the second Adam is grieved; so it is not only by the man, the second Adam, but in his very personality, that his spouse is blessed and sustained; and in the husband, that the wife, one flesh with him, is blessed.

As the first Adam attempted to arrogate the tree of life, by the solicitation of his wife, so the second Adam is the solicitor of his spouse, to unite with him in seeking that tree rightfully his. And even as it was, because Adam hearkened to the voice of his wife, and disobeyed, that he obtained the possession of spiritual, the inheritance of natural death, a cursed and barren earth, sorrow in its unwilling produce, and toil-toil in its heavy culture, as the necessary condition of a short prolongation of living distress; so was it, because Christ, the great counterpart of Adam, having in flesh obeyed, obtained the gift of life, and the resurrection from natural death, and the title-deeds of that glorious and endless inheritance in which the earth shall bring forth her increase, in which toil and woe shall be unknown, and death, all baffled and spoiled, shall never resume his work; that his wife, made to hearken unto him, shall not in herself, but in him, obtain the like reward. The address here recorded, is an address concerning this life alone. The then Adam had his direct promise given, because the promise rested not on any work of the old Adam, but on the achievements of the woman's seed, the second Adam. Death natural is made the termination of the subject; and the death spiritual which came on the