guilty of, in being deceived by so low a seducer. The words are, as if God had said to the serpent: "Although thou hast done this great mischief, yet thou art no lofty and respectable creature; thou art one of the meanest of all animals; thou art not raised to any high form, but art a mere reptile, and shalt always continue to be so; upon thy belly thou art made to go; and shalt feed low all the days of thy life, in the very dust."* Adam and Eve had conceived high notions of the serpent, above all the beasts of the field which the Lord had made;' but God here reprehends their foolish fancy, and sets before them, what their own eyes might have told them, that the serpent was a creature made only for a very low life; and that no such elevation as they imagined should ever belong to him." The translators of the bible, were, I dare say, led to think a punishment was here inflicted upon the serpent, from the expression of his being cursed above every beast of the field. To be cursed, may be to have some "Was there ever a second person of the above opinion? Surely such a far-fetched interpretation of a text never saw the sun.- --EDIT. 1 Gen. iii. 1. The ancient naturalists drave largely considered the propriety of the motion of a serpent, to its whole make, and construction of the nature of its body; ἐκ τέτων γὰρ φανερον, ότι τῶν ἔναιμων οσα κατά μήκο ασυμμετρα είσι προς την αλλην του σώματος φυσιν, καθάπερ οι οφείς, ουθεν έναν τε αυτῶν ὑποπεδον εἶναι. Aristot, lib. de Ani malium incessu, c. viii. signal mischief or great evil, either wished to, or inflicted upon, the person cursed. This is indeed the general signification of the word; but it ought to be considered, whether it is contrary to the nature of the Hebrew tongue, to call a thing cursed, when such circumstances belong to it as are so extremely bad, that it might be deemed as unhappy a thing, even as a most severe curse, to be under them, though they be not inAicted as a particular judgment. In this sense the Jews, in our Saviour's time, called their vulgar or common people cursed," who, they thought, could not know the law. We cannot suppose them, here, as meaning that the body of their people were under any particular curse or judgment of God, which deprived them of all possibility of knowing their duties; rather they thought of them in the sentiment of the prophet; Surely these are poor; they are foolish, for they know not the way of the Lord, nor the judgment of their God; I will get me to the great men, and will speak unto them, for they have known the way of the Lord. The prophet here looks upon the poor, not as particularly cursed of God; for this he could not think," but they were in such circumstances as might not have afforded them any considerable information concerning their duties, and he. therefore said, he would get him to the great, as reputing it more likely to find them ready to hear and understand. In this way the Jews held their estimation of the common people: they imagined it not likely that John vii. 49. * See Prov. xxii. 1. Deut. xv. 11. Jerein. v. 4, 5. these should know the law; therefore they deemed them so despicably ignorant, that though no particular judgment of God was in the case, yet they held them in no kind of regard, but as in a cursed or most contemptible condition. It is no unnatural way of speaking to say of poor, barren, and unprofitable land, that it is cursed ground; not only where God may have been pleased to make a fruitful land barren, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein, as was particularly the case of the earth that was cursed upon our first parents' having sinned, but also when the land is very steril and unfruitful, though no particular curse of God has ever been denounced against it. In the Hebrew tongue we often find things, eminently excellent in their kind, said therefore to be of God; cedars of Lebanon, highly flourishing, to be, for that reason, of God's planting; so, on the contrary, the word cursed may as resonably be used, as it were in contrast, where God had given no appearance of a blessing. Adam and Eve were think ing highly of the serpent; the design of what God now said was to shew them, that he was a creature deserving their lowest notice: they thought him above any beast of the field which the Lord had made. The words here spoken were to tell them, that he was not above, but beneath all others; so creeping and abject, that his make and form might be spoken of in terms, as if they were a curse upon him." 9 Psal. cvii. 34. Gen iii. 17. I do not know whether I might not observe, that the death of being hanged on a tree, was said to be a cursed But the words that next follow have greater difficulties: And I will put enmity between thee and the wo man, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. The enquiries I would make concerning these words are, I. Whether Adam and Eve understood them? II. Whether they conceived that they had any reference to the animal, the serpent from whose mouth they had heard the words which had beguiled Eve? III. What may be the true and literal meaning of them? I. Are we sure that Adam and Eve understood what God now spake to them?" They are words, which, I hope, I shall be able reasonably to explain, and shew to be the first prophecy which was made to the world. I call them a prophecy, as speaking of events to come; and that for many days to come, referring to what was to be accomplished in times that were afar off. Therefore, though it seems obvious that Adam and Eve death in this sense of the word. See Deut. xxi. 22, 23. There were other deaths inflicted by the laws of God; such as stoning with stones till a man died, Levit. xx. 2, 27, &c. Whoever came under the sentence of this, or any other death inflicted by God's law, was as really accursed of God, as he that was hanged on a tree; but the ignominy of this death was despicable beyond others: it had a shame belonging to it, hard to get over and despise; it was stigmatized, low, and base, beyond other punishments, and therefore had peculiarly this term of reproach annexed to it. Gen. iii. 15. " Ibid. * Ezek. xii. 27. See Dan, xii, 8, 9, 13. x. 14. viii. 26, 27. vii. 28. might understand, from what was spoken, that the enemy who had hurt them would at length be conquered; yet it does not appear that they were precisely informed who this enemy was, nor what the contest was which should be with him and against him; nor how, or by whom in particular he should be subdued. What had been said in their hearing, concerning the cursed or very low and grovelling nature of the serpent, must have apprized them that they had been much mistaken in their notions of this animal. Whether it caused them to reflect, although they did not before think so, that the serpent did not perhaps speak of himself; but that they had some greater enemy whom they had not seen, nor known, I cannot say; but that our first parents, though their experimental knowledge could as yet be but little, were not of slow parts, but able to turn every thing hinted to them over in their minds, to conceive of it all that a lively imagination would, as far as they could know things, present to them, must, I think, be admitted as unquestionable; and that they henceforward acquitted the serpent of all guilt towards them, seems to me to appear from what I shall presently consider, viz. that we have no hints in history, that either they, or their immediate descendants, commenced any particular enmity or hostility against the animals called scrpents, any more than against any other animals of the world. But, that Adam and Eve knew the real meaning of what was here said to them, any more than the ancient prophets perfectly understood what was revealed to them, to be by them declared unto the world, is what I see no reason to conclude. Are we to think that Daniel, after he had written down what had been |