up in vexatious exuberance. Noxious reptiles and devouring insects ravage his harvest fields. Cold and heat, drought and flood, storms and tempest desolate sea and land, and defeat his fondest hopes. Millions are destined to procure a scanty and sorrowful subsistence from the rocky soil and impoverished bosom of that earth which was once watered only by the dews of heaven, and which, now at best, yields its fruits only to painful labor and toil. Toil that is unremitted, and mingled with watchfulness, care, and solicitude; toil that becomes a burden and a weariness to the body and the mind; but which the sun everywhere looks upon as it sets upon millions of the weary and heavy-laden, and as it rises only to urge them on in labor and weariness. It is toil which pervades all classes and orders of men, and all the professions they follow. The rich are no more exempt from it than the poor; nor is the student any more exempt from it than the craftsman and the day-laborer. It is toil which none can shrink from without being the greater sufferers, and which ends only with the decrepitude of years and where "the weary are at rest."

But this was not all. Their sin was the parent sin of the race, as they themselves were its parents. If we look for the source of man's universal sinfulness, we trace it to this fountain-head. If we inquire, Whence is it that every child of

Adam possesses "a carnal mind that is enmity against God;" and why it is that this entire world of intelligent and moral beings, in every age and land, and under all the varieties of their external condition, is distinguished by all the characteristics of wickedness, convulsed by furious passions, rankling with envy, pride, and malice; and how it is, that iniquity in all its forms of ungoverned and unrestrained selfishness, seducing and being seduced-deceiving and being deceived-often gratified and still exacting, and when ungratified still more intense and vehement-always predominating, and yet becoming more clamorous-and unless arrested by heavenly grace, waxing worse and worse; we can only say that our fallen primogenitors begat a posterity in their own fallen likeness. They are born depraved, because this was the character of their depraved parents. "The cockatrice's egg has broken out into a viper."

This first sin involved the race in sin; and sin is as truly characteristic of everything that is human as speech and reason. The youngest infant and the man of gray hairs suffer and die, because they are sinners. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin: and so death passed upon all men, for that all are sinners." By an ar rangement of heavenly wisdom, and for the best of purposes, Adam was constituted the federal head and representative of his posterity. "By the

offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation;" through "the offence of one, many are dead;" the "judgment was by one to condemnation;" and "by one man's disobedience, many were made sinners." The law of Paradise was given to the first man, not only as the root from which all the branches of the race should proceed, and from which they should derive their nature, but as their appointed representative. In the eye of the law, they fell when he fell; his forfeiture of eternal life and his legal responsibilities were entailed upon them; they are his heirs, and the heirs of this attainted inheritance. Every sin, every sorrow, every grave, and every sigh in the prison of eternal despair is not only the fruit of sin in the individual sufferer, but the fruit and expressive memento of that "mortal sin original." The "angel standing in the midst of the sun, did not occupy a prouder position than innocent man;" the foul fiend, confined in chains of darkness, scarcely occupies a more abject position than sinning man immediately after his fall, incurring as he himself did, the wrath and curse of God, both in this life and that which is to come, and, but for God's preventing grace, dragging after him the unnumbered generations of men.

Why he was suffered to fall, we know in part; but we may well wait for the solution of this problem, till we know more of the final issues of

that great Redemption of which the "second Adam, the Lord from heaven" is both the Author and the Finisher. It is not necessary to push our inquiries on this point any farther, than to have the assurance, that "high and mighty purposes" have been, and are yet to be thereby accomplished. If man fell from a lofty height, and infinite mercy caught him in his guilty fall, we may be sure that his apostasy is in harmony with the ends of infinite wisdom, rectitude and goodness, and that those ends will be accomplished.

It is much more important for us to leave these problems unsolved than to neglect the great moral lessons which man's first sin reads to us. Sin is a very different thing after it is committed from what men imagine it to be before. To measure the wickedness of that one offence, lies not within the range of human thought. Yet such is all sin. It is always an evil that cannot be measured. It is not possible for the human mind to travel over the immeasurable tracts of misery which it describes. Loud and admonitory is the voice from this first sin. Serpent-like, it charms but to devour. It made Lucifer the "archangel ruined," and the loveliest, happiest pair the most degraded and the most miserable. It is easier to sin than to bear the punishment of sin, or to repent of it after the deed is done.

We need not throw the blame of our own sins

on our great ancestor. It is a crushing burden he has to bear, if he has not found a forgiving God. "If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself: and if thou scornest, thou alone shalt bear it." We have nothing to cover us from God's omniscient eye; no cloak for our sin; no fig-leaf covering even to hide our shame. It is not to such a covering that we must repair. As well might our first parents have thrown themselves back upon their obedience to the law they had broken, as we, their descendants, have recourse to works of law for our justification before God. This is an unavailing-nay, a preposterous refuge for a transgressor. It is too late now to think of such a hiding-place. Yet is there a refuge even for the transgressor. One there is who is "an hiding-place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."