and in their ignorance of the insurmountable difficulties which (on the same mode of reasoning) press upon the fundamental articles of their own remnant of a creed. But arguments, which would prove the falsehood of a known truth, must themselves be false, and can prove the falsehood of no other position in eodem genere.

This hint I have thrown out as a spark that may perhaps fall where it will kindle. And worthily might the wisest of men make inquisition into the three momentous points here spoken of, for the purposes of speculative insight, and for the formation of enlarged and systematic views of the destination of man, and the dispensation of God. But the practical inquirer (I speak not of those who inquire for the gratification of curiosity, and still less of those who labour as students only to shine as disputants; but of one, who seeks the truth, because he feels the want of it,) the practical inquirer, I say, hath already placed his foot on the rock, if he have satisfied himself that whoever needs not a Redeemer is more than human. Remove from him the difficulties and objections that oppose or perplex his belief of a crucified Saviour; convince him of the reality of sin, which is impossible without a knowledge of its true nature and inevitable consequences; and then satisfy him as to the fact historically, and as to the truth spiritually, of a redemption therefrom by Christ; do this for him, and there is little fear that he will permit either logical quirks or metaphysical puzzles to contravene the plain dictate of his common sense, that the sinless One that redeemed mankind from sin, must have been more than man; and that He who brought light and immortality into the world, could not in his own nature have been an inheritor of death and darkness. It is morally impossible that a man with these convictions should suffer the objection of incomprehensibility (and this on a subject of faith) to overbalance the

manifest absurdity and contradiction in the notion of a Mediator between God and the human race, at the same infinite distance from God as the race for whom he mediates.

The origin of evil, meanwhile, is a question interesting only to the metaphysician, and in a system of moral and religious philosophy. The man of sober mind, who seeks for truths that possess a moral and practical interest, is content to be certain, first, that evil must have had a beginning, since otherwise it must either be God, or a co-eternal and co-equal rival of God; both impious notions, and the latter foolish to boot-secondly, that it could not originate in God; for if so, it would be at once evil and not evil, or God would be at once God (that is, infinite goodness) and not God-both alike impossible positions. Instead therefore of troubling himself with this barren controversy, he more profitably turns his inquiries to that evil which most concerns himself, and of which he may find the origin.

The entire scheme of necessary Faith may be reduced to two heads;-first, the object and occasion, and secondly, the fact and effect,-of our redemption by Christ and to this view does the order of the following Comments correspond. I have begun with Original Sin, and proceeded in the following Aphorism to the doctrine of Redemption. The Comments on the remaining Aphorisms are all subsidiary to these, or written in the hope of making the minor tenets of general belief be believed in a spirit worthy of these. They are, in short, intended to supply a febrifuge against aguish scruples and horrors, the hectic of the soul;-and" for servile and thrall-like fear, to substitute that adoptive and cheerful boldness, which our new alliance with God requires of us as Christians." (Milton). Not the origin of evil, not the chronology of sin, or the chronicles of the original sinner; but sin originant, underived from without, and no passive link in the adamantine chain

of effects, each of which is in its turn an instrument of causation, but no one of them a cause ;-not with sin inflicted, which would be a calamity;—not with sin (that is, an evil tendency) implanted, for which let the planter be responsible; but I begin with original sin. And for this purpose I have selected the Aphorism from the ablest and most formidable antagonist of this doctrine, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, and from the most eloquent work of this most eloquent of divines. Had I said, of men, Cicero would forgive me, and Demosthenes nod assent! *

* We have the assurance of Bishop Horsley, that the Church of England does not demand the literal understanding of the document contained in the second (from verse 8) and third Chapters of Genesis as a point of faith, or regard a different interpretation as affecting the orthodoxy of the interpreter: divines of the most unimpeachable orthodoxy, and the most averse to the allegorizing of Scripture history in general, having from the earliest ages of the Christian Church adopted or permitted it in this instance. And indeed no unprejudiced man can pretend to doubt, that if in any other work of Eastern origin he met with trees of life and of knowledge; or talking and conversable snakes:

Inque rei signum serpentem serpere jussum ;

he would want no other proofs that it was an allegory he was reading, and intended to be understood as such. Nor, if we suppose him conversant with Oriental works of any thing like the same antiquity, could it surprise him to find events of true history in connexion with, or historical personages among the actors and interlocutors of, the parable. In the temple-language of Egypt the serpent was the symbol of the understanding in its twofold function, namely, as the faculty, of means to proximate or medial ends, analogous to the instinct of the more intelligent animals, ant, bee, beaver, and the like, and opposed to the practical reason, as the determinant of the ultimate end; and again, as the discursive and logical faculty possessed individually by each individual-the λóyoc v cáory, in distinction from the vous, that is, intuitive reason, the source of ideas and absolute truths, and the principle of the necessary and the universal in our affirmations and conclusions. Without or in contra-vention to the reason (that is, the spiritual mind of St. Paul, and the light that lighteth every man of St. John) this understanding (pρóvnμa σaρks, or carnal mind) becomes the sophistic principle, the wily

APHORISM X.

ON ORIGINAL SIN.

JEREMY TAYLOR.

Is there any such thing? That is not the question. For it is a fact acknowledged on all hands almost: and even those who will not confess it in words, confess it in their complaints. For my part I cannot but confess that to be, which I feel and groan under, and by which all the world is miserable.

tempter to evil by counterfeit good; the pander and advocate of the passions and appetites: ever in league with, and always first applying to, the desire, as the inferior nature in man, the woman in our humanity; and through the desire prevailing on the will (the manhood, virtus) against the command of the universal reason, and against the light of reason in the will itself. This essential inherence of an intelligential principle (pus νοερόν) in the will (ἀρχὴ θελητική,) or rather the will itself thus considered, the Greeks expressed by an appropriate word, Bovλn. This, but little differing from Origen's interpretation or hypothesis, is supported and confirmed by the very old tradition of the homo androgynus, that is, that the original man, the individual first created, was bi-sexual: a chimæra, of which, and of many other mythological traditions, the most probable explanation is, that they were originally symbolical glyphs or sculptures, and afterwards translated into words, yet literally, that is, into the common names of the several figures and images composing the symbol; while the symbolic meaning was left to be decyphered as before, and sacred to the initiate. As to the abstruseness and subtlety of the conceptions, this is so far from being an objection to this oldest gloss on this venerable relic of Semitic, not impossibly ante-diluvian, philosophy, that to those who have carried their researches farthest back into Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian antiquity, it will seem a strong confirmation. Or if I chose to address the Sceptic in the language of the day, I might remind him, that as alchemy went before chemistry, and astrology before astronomy, so in all countries of civilized man have metaphysics outrun common sense. Fortunately for us that they have so! For from all we know of the unmetaphysical tribes of New Holland and elsewhere, a common sense not preceded by metaphysics is no very enviable possession. O be not cheated, my youthful reader, by this shallow

Adam turned his back on the sun, and dwelt in the dark and the shadow. He sinned, and brought

prate! The creed of true common sense is composed of the results of scientific meditation, observation, and experiment, as far as they are generally intelligible. It differs therefore in different countries, and in every different age of the same country. The common sense of a people is the moveable index of its average judgment and information. Without metaphysics science could have had no language, and common sense no materials.

But to return to my subject. It cannot be denied, that the Mosaic narrative thus interpreted gives a just and faithful exposition of the birth and parentage and successive moments of phenomenal sin (peccatum phænomenon; crimen primarium et commune), that is, of sin as it reveals itself in time, and is an immediate object of consciousness. And in this sense most truly does the Apostle assert, that in Adam we all fell. The first human sinner is the adequate representative of all his successors. And with no less truth may it be said, that it is the same Adam that falls in every man, and from the same reluctance to abandon the too dear and undivorceable Eve: and the same Eve tempted by the same serpentine and perverted understanding, which, framed originally to be the interpreter of the reason and the ministering angel of the spirit, is henceforth sentenced and bound over to the service of the animal nature, its needs and its cravings, dependent on the senses for all its materials, with the world of sense for its appointed sphere: Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life. I have shown elsewhere, that as the Instinct of the mere intelligence differs in degree not in kind, and circumstantially, not essentially, from the vis vite, or vital power in the assimilative and digestive functions of the stomach and other organs of nutrition, even so the understanding in itself, and distinct from the reason and conscience, differs in degree only from the instinct in the animal. It is still but a beast of the field, though more subtle than any beast of the field, and therefore in its corruption and perversion cursed above any-a pregnant word! of which, if the reader wants an exposition or paraphrase, he may find one more than two thousand years old among the fragments of the poet Menander. (See Cumberland's Observer, No. CL. vol. iii. p. 289, 290.) This is the understanding which in its every thought is to be brought under obedience to faith; which it can scarcely fail to be, if only it be first subjected to the reason, of which spiritual faith is even the blossoming and the fructifying process. For it is indifferent whether I say that faith is the interpenetration of the reason and the will, or that it is at once the assurance and the commencement of the approaching union between the