mortally infected: In the interval, remedies might be applied to prevent the threatened mischief. Again, the declaration that God himself puts this enmity between the serpent and mankind, implies, that the merciful though offended God will yet take an interest in the fortunes of man, and will support him in his conflict with the adversary."

You see, that, by considering this denunciation of the serpent's doom in connexion only with that particular story of which it is a part, without any knowledge of later prophecies and revelations, our heathen has been able to dive into the prophetic meaning of words, which, taken by themselves, he did not know to be at all prophetic. The particular events, indeed, which may correspond to the images of the prediction, he hath not yet been able to assign; but of the general purport of the prophecy he has formed a very just notion. He is besides aware, that mysteries are contained in it more than he can yet unravel. He is sensible that it cannot be without some important meaning, that

either the whole or some remarkable part of Adam's posterity, contrary to to the general notions of mankind and the common forms of all languages, is expressed under the image of the woman's seed rather than the man's. I must here observe, that Adam, with respect to the insight he may be supposed to have had into the sense of this curse upon the serpent, was probably for some time much in the situation of our supposed heathen, aware that it contained a general intimation of an intended deliverance, but much in the dark about the particular explication of it. This prophecy was therefore to Adam, when it was first delivered, so far intelligible as to be a ground of hope, at the same time that the darkness of the terms in which it was conceived must have kept him anxiously attentive to every event that might seem connected with the completion of it, and to any new light that might be given him by succeeding predictions or promises.

And, by the

important se

way, this points out one condary use of the original obscurity and gradual elucidation of prophecy by suc

ceeding prophecies and by events: This method of prediction awakens the curiosity of mankind.

But let us give our heathen, whose curiosity is keen upon the subject, farther lights: Let us carry him, by proper steps, through the whole volume of the sacred oracles ; and let us instruct him in that great mystery of godliness which from the beginning of the world was hidden with God, but in these later ages hath been made manifest by the preaching of the blessed apostles and evangelists; and, when his heart is touched with a sense of the mercies conferred on him through Christ-when he has taken a view of the whole of the prophetic word, and has seen its correspondence with the history of Jesus, and the beginnings of his gospel, let him then return to the curse upon the serpent. Will he now find in it any thing ambiguous or obscure? Will he hesitate a moment to pronounce, that the serpent who received this dreadful doom could be no other than an animated emblem of that malignant spirit who in the latest prophecies is called

the Old Dragon? Or rather, will he not pronounce that this serpent was that very spirit, in his proper person, dragged by some unseen power into the presence of Jehovah, to receive his doom in the same reptile form which he had assumed to wreck his spite on unsuspecting man?for which exploit of wicked and dishonourable cunning, the opprobrious names of the Serpent and the Dragon have ever since been fixed upon him in derision and reproach. Will not our enlightened and converted heathen understand the circumstances which are mentioned of the serpent's natural condition as intimations of something analogous in the degraded state of the rebellious angel? By the days of the serpent's life, will he not understand a certain limited period, during which, for the exercise of man's virtue, and the fuller manifestation of God's power and goodness, the infernal Dragon is to be permitted to live his life of malice, to exercise his art of delusion on the sons of men? - while, in the adjuncts of that life, the grovelling posture and the gritty meal, will he not read the condition of a vile and despicable

being, to whom all indulgence but that of malice is denied - to whom little freedom of action is intrusted? Will he have a doubt that the seed of this serpent are the same that in other places are called the Devil's angels? Will he not correct his former surmises about the seed of the woman and the wound to be inflicted by the serpent in the heel? Will he not perceive that the seed of the woman is an image, not generally descriptive of the descendants of Adam, but characteristic of an individual, — emphatically expressive of that person, who, by the miraculous manner of his conception, was peculiarly and properly the son of Eve? that the wound to be suffered by this person in the heel denotes the sufferings with which the Devil and his emissaries were permitted to exercise the Captain of our Salvation? And will he not discern, in the accomplishment of man's redemption, and the successful propagation of the gospel, the mortal blow inflicted on the serpent's head? -when the ignorance which he had spread over the world was dispelled by the light of reveJation, when his secret influence on the