Jehovah Himself-no such distinction being put on the beasts that perish. He was also reminded that, as he lived by the exercise of God's power and love, so he should live for the promotion of all God's designs; and as the Lord who gave could also take away-as He who made alive could kill, Deut. xxxii. 39—he must ever labour for that close intimacy between the Giver and the receiver, on which his continued existence depended, see Job xii. 10, Acts xvii. 28.

2. Man became a living soul; by which we are to understand that man was distinguished from the beasts, not only by the excellence, but by the duration of the life imparted to him from the supreme fountain. In continued union with God, he would have lived for ever. The life which he received was eternal life, conditional on his abiding in his Creator, and thus enjoying the advantage of ceaseless communication with Him who is the vital principle of all creation. It was intended that man should live in God, and God in him; and upon this his continuance in being depended. To prove the fact, the creature was permitted to sever the connection, and immedi ately he withered and died. Jesus has come to repair the broken tie, and life, eternal life, is necessarily the result. Thus Jesus is now the life—the only life of man. Without Him, reader, as you are cut off from God and from life by the fall, you must remain a severed, a withered, and burning branch for ever.

III. HIS LOCATION IN EDEN. As we have in Adam a specimen of unfallen humanity, so the Spirit invites our attention to a sample of a world without sin and the curse, in the garden prepared for his reception. It was a place of delights, affording to the man every gratification of his newborn senses, and satisfying him of the love, wisdom, and power of his Creator. Moreover, the tree of life in the midst of the garden daily renewed his energies, freshened all his pleasurable feelings, and sustained the bloom of his youth. Above all, God was with him, and gave him constant tokens of His Fatherly affection, supplying his mind and heart with continually increasing subjects of admiration, gratitude, and joy. We are invited to contemplate—

1. His occupation. To "dress the garden of Eden

and to keep it," verse 15. Idleness formed no part of the happiness which a wise Creator had allotted to His intelligent creature. It was in the use of the faculties with which he was endowed that the pleasure to be derived from them was to consist. God Himself finds His happiness in the exercise of His glorious attributes; and man was created after His likeness in this respect as in others. The occupations of Eden were such as ministered to the healthy development of his powers of mind and body, without weariness or pain, and they teach us that if a life of idleness be now considered, as it often is, man's supreme enjoyment, it is only because that, in this case, as in all others, man, in his fallen presumption, affects to be wiser than his Maker, and would invent for himself a heaven neither suited to his own nature nor to the mind of the Allwise. That exertion now produces lassitude and suffering is owing to the curse; but that curse is no less attached to indolence and inactivity, while an additional condemnation must rest upon the violation of the law of labour operative even in paradise. Our beloved Redeemer never rested from toil-He felt that He must ever "be about His Father's business," Luke ii. 49; and His meat was "to finish the work which He had given Him to do," John iv. 34, xvii. 4. 2. His provision. Man's heavenly Father knew what he had need of; for he had created him subject to physical appetites, and for each of these He provided an appropriate supply. The body is more than meat; but meat is indispensable to the sustenance and health of the body. Accordingly, the Lord God caused to grow in Eden " every tree that is pleasant to the eye and good for food," verse 9, and told Adam that he might freely partake of them, with one exception, to which we shall by and bye refer. Thus it is

manifest that God created man to seek and to find enjoyment. Although He had made him capable of suffering, it was not His will that he should suffer. His liability to feel want was intended only to impel him instinctively to seek gratification, and as the means of gratification were abundantly afforded, it is manifest that man's necessities were from the first intended as God's opportunities of exercising love and conferring favour. And so it should be now; but man is not in

Eden, and God is not his acknowledged provider. He chose self-dependence, and was driven into a wilderness world to test his own resources. How can we complain, then, of appetites without gratification, or wants without supply? We wearied of the Eden covenant, and demanded to be our own providers, with a fair field for the exercise of our skill; and if our expectations have been disappointed, and our schemes have failed, who is to blame? The piercing cry of hunger, or the pining wretchedness of physical destitution, would have been for ever unknown, had the Eden state of earth continued, that is, if man had not daringly ventured to experiment on himself and his world, but had been content to let God develope the resources of His infinite wisdom and benevolence; but he has " changed the ordinance, broken the covenant," Isaiah xxiv. 5, and must not be surprised if, of the thorns which his sin and folly have caused to spring up, he cannot gather figs; nor of the bramble bush he can gather grapes, Luke vi. 44, see Gen. iii. 18. He must look for the reversal of his own decision-a restoration to the Eden state of mind and condition which he once enjoyed, acknowledging that his project has failed-that the wisdom of the serpent is foolishness-and that as he was created for God, so in Him alone he has dignity and delight. Blessed be Jehovah, the opportunity is provided; a new Adam to bring us to God and to paradise, is appointed in the place of him who led us away. He is in the Father and in the midst of the throne, and all His spiritual children are there also in Him. He now offers to

"raise up the poor out of the dust, and to lift up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory," 1 Sam. ii. 8. His reign will be an everlasting feast, Isaiah XXV. 6, Mat. xxii. 4, and the happy occupants of His kingdom shall "hunger no more, neither thirst any more," Rev. vii. 16. It will be paradise restored with its tree of life, feeding, satisfying, healing, and eternally quickening the children of the new creation, Rev. xxii. 2,

3. The exercise of his moral faculties. All orders and species of created things were made to unite at certain points of contact, wherein they met and were

found to correspond-thus, animals, vegetables, and minerals, are found linked together by some member of each family, partaking of a double nature, which places it either in the higher or lower scale of being; but man was placed at the head of ali, and he, by his complex nature, was brought into contact with God Himself, and again claimed kindred with the inferior animals. The mutual association which other creatures were compelled to preserve by immutable laws, man was taught to recognise and approve by the exercise of his reason, that noble faculty by which he is raised supereminently above all other ranks and orders of earthly creatures; and, seeing the wisdom and expediency of the arrangement which had been made, to give to its promotion all the support of his high position and superior intelligence. But his first step in this direction must be to recognise his own subordination to the great Creator of all-to be subject in all things to Him was the first law of his being, and his highest philosophy; and to exercise him in that great attainment, his gracious Father set him a law, simple in its form, suitable to his condition, and of direct obligation, and one that appeared under his circumstances easy of fulfilment. Obedience to this law required the developement of his moral faculties, which otherwise would have been without object and without exercise so that as often as his eye rested on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, his soul was sacramentally fed with the word of God, information of himself, his relation, circumstances, prosperity, obligations, a sense of the value of life and its dependence on the breath of the Living One, a consciousness of his liability to die and be cut off from God, and a grateful acknowledgement of the Divine beneficence, in the exhaustless provision which had been made for his intellectual and physical enjoyment. To preserve these blessings he knew what he must do, and thus his mind was exercised with reflections on the character and authority of his God, his own position and its advantages, and the duties which devolved on him as a subordinate and responsible creature. Man now was under the law with every motive to obedience, and could he have persevered therein, he would have been without sin, but he would also have been without

Christ. "But all things were created for and by the Son of God," Col. i. 16; and the exercise of man's moral faculties did not preserve him in the hour of trial, because "God would be glorified only through Christ Jesus," John xiii. 31, 1 Pet. iv. 11.

IV. HIS VICE-ROYALTY. Placed by his mental superiority at the head of all created things, man received a direct commission from his Maker to exercise "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Observe

1. The person who was to rule: Adam, the first man, and as in immediate connection with this high appointment, he received the command-" Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," there can be no doubt but that, had Adam continued sinless, and become the progenitor of a sinless posterity, he would have held sway over all his descendants, and been acknowledged as the representative of God in every age; and to this end his Creator would have richly endowed him with all the qualifications necessary for his exalted and responsible office. He would not only have "crowned him with glory and honour," Psalm viii. 5, but also with wisdom, righteousness, might, &c. But it was not to be. One far more exalted and excellent, even the God-man, was to supersede him, and by His oneness with the Father bring humanity into still closer relation with deity, and to a state of still higher moral and physical perfection. All the redeemed shall acknowledge His righteous sceptre, and exult in His elevation to the supreme authority, because He is one with them, and they with Him; and He, partaker of their flesh and blood, shall never be ashamed to call them brethren, Heb. ii. 11, 14.

Eden just now

2. The extent of his dominion. and its occupants, as a sample of the vast territory to be afterwards submitted to his sway. "Thou," says the Psalmist, "madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the sea.” Psalm viii. 6—8. Unfallen Adam, therefore, would have been the acknowledged ruler, under Jehovah, of