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out finding a great pressure of want and distress? I answer; we read Moses too hastily, if we do not observe, 1. However our first parents were allowed within the garden to eat of every tree, except one; and the trees of the earth, as well as the herb upon the face of all the earth, were given them for food; yet, upon their expulsion from the garden, their living would be, thenceforth, chiefly of the ground. Are we to think, because God planted or created within that particular spot of ground, which he had distinguished from all others to be called the garden, trees, of whatever perfection he was pleased to give them, that, therefore, all trees were of their full growth, and abounded in their fruits all over the world? Rather, may we not apprehend, that the earth, in many parts, was made only to put forth its shoots, which grew gradually up to their perfection ? When Adam and Eve, therefore, were driven out of the garden, fruits of trees, acorns, and great plenty of berries, might be more rare than we may hastily imagine; a point, I think hinted, in that at first the fowls of the air, as well as every beast of the earth, were to live, not so remarkably of the fruit of trees, as of the green herb; distinguished from the trees, and said to grow upon the face of all the earth: it was of a lower growth, nearer to, and more closely covering the ground.1 2. But we cannot form an exact theory of the labours of our first parents' lives, because we cannot ascertain how long they lived in their first habitation, before they

ǹ Gen. ii. 16, 17.

i. Gen. i. 29.

* Gen. iii. 17.

1 Gen. i. 29.

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committed the transgression which caused them to be driven from it. We may observe, that one part of their employment in the garden was leabdah, to dress it it is the same word which is used, where we are told, that God sent Adam forth from the garden, laabad, to till the ground, from whence he was taken. Adam was now put out of the garden into the adjacent country, where God created him; his tillage, expressed by the same word as his dressing the garden, seems to have been the same employment, only to be exercised upon a different soil. And if we may suppose that he had been exercised long enough in the garden, to know what the employment was which God had given him in it; we cannot think him quite a novice in what was now to be his labour. Nothing, in truth, confounds us in forming our conceptions concerning our first parents, except thinking that the Fall happened instantly, before they had lived long enough to have some experience of living. Let us only suppose it not so early; but that they might have had some months to observe the herbs of the garden what they liked best to eat, and how they might cultivate them to give them a due growth, and we may suppose them sent forth into the world, with this care, to find places here and there, where there were such produce as they had eaten of; to cul tivate and to preserve them; to weed out the thistles which soon began to grow amongst them; to defend and keep them from the cattle; that enough of them

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לעברה

.23 .Gen. iii .לעבר את האדמה •

n Gen. ii. 15.

P Ibid.

might be had within such distances as they could go to for the sustenance of their lives. This labour, if duly considered, will be allowed to have been a burden which they had not felt whilst they lived in the garden; and to be sufficient, although at first, before both beasts and cattle, and mankind, were multiplied on the earth, it would not be absolutely too much for them. The first husbandry was no more than gardening; and the grounds most commodious for the early tillage were reputed to be such spots as might be made gardens of herbs; and the easiest and happiest situation for these was accounted such, that a man might water them with the greatest ease; and such spots of ground abounded out of the garden, all along the land of Eden, on the borders of its rivers. Upon one of these, I conceive, Adam bestowed his first pains, and by a diligent care cultivated and preserved in them enough for him and Eve, of what they had often before eaten within the garden. When mankind came to multiply, it would be necessary for them to look for further provision; and before Adam was a hundred and thirty years old, Cain, one of his sons, began improvements in tillage." And

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9 Antiquitas nihil priùs mirata est quàm- -HortosHinc primum agricolæ æstimabantur prisci. Vide Plinii Nat. Hist. lib. 19. c. 19. sect. 1-3.

Deut. xi. 10.

• Ibid. Vide quæ sup.

Felicitas major Babyloniæ, Seleucia, Euphrate atque Tigre restagnantibus, quoniam rigandi modus ibi manu temperatur. Plinii Nat. Hist. lib. 18. c. 47. ad fin.

" Adam was 130 years old at the birth of Seth, after the death of Abel. Gen. iv. 25.-v. 3. Abel was killed by Cain

though iron, or brass, was not yet found out, and conse quently no instruments for tillage were made of any metals; it requires no extraordinary imagination to conceive, that this early age might, by the means of sharp stones, cut wood, and frame tools of divers sorts, such as would serve well enough to perform their less improved agriculture:

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primi cuneis scindebant fissile lignum.

VIRG.

Or we may suppose the first men were soon able to contrive how to pull off, or to cut, from young trees such twigs as might be scraped, and reduced to fit the uses they had occasion to make of them; before they knew how in a workman-like manner to take down a whole tree, or wanted, or even had, large trees for greater occasions. Arts and improvements grew, and had their progress: Abel began to be a keeper of sheep; and Jabal, a descendant of Cain, in the sixth descent from him, set up booths or tents in the fields, and began to order herds of greater cattle: and Tubal Cain, about the same

about the time when each of them brought an offering unto God, from the improvement of their respective employments, not many years, I suppose, before the birth of Seth. Gen. iv.. 24.

* The great use of sharp stones made in the first unimproved ages of all countries, might be collected from all who have written of the American nations. It might likewise be observed, that even the use of them, to cut as with a knife, was not in some improved countries laid aside even in Moses' time. See Exod. iv. 25.

time, found out and instructed others to be artificers in brass and iron. And now we may apprehend that the tillage of the earth received an increase by improvements:

Mox et frumentis labor additus. VIRGIL.

The garden tillage would not afford a sufficient produce for the increased multitudes of mankind; nor could large tracts be managed with the insufficient implements of the most early husbandry; but, as they wanted them, human art and industry contrived better. Thus agriculture grew and increased gradually, as the necessities of mankind called for farther and larger improvements of it. In all this, one observation only is material, that the sentence of God upon man was in all these ages felt enough to keep them sensible of that part of the punishment denounced, which concerned the labour of their lives. Our first parents had not such enlarged wants as their more numerous posterity; but having less knowledge how to supply their lesser demands, sufficient for their day was the labour thereof. As the gracious purpose of God was not instantly to destroy man, but to have him ripened through a mortal life for a happier state, no wants oppressed him, but

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