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"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

Some cursory remarks on the most prominent parts of what I have just cited from the Bible seem to me requisite. We here see Adam exercising his dominion or lordship, by bestowing names on the living creatures, which the Creator approved of, and confirmed; after which follows the creation of Eve, by the extraction (while the man slept) of a part of his side; of which part, or rib, the Creator made a woman, and brought her unto the man. Recognition on the part of Adam, on beholding the woman was instantaneous, and he exclaimed "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh;" a most expressive form and declaration of acknowledging the sameness of self with self. On this helpmeet, the man again exercised his prerogative of bestowing the name of woman, because she was taken out of man; after which, Adam, still under the influence of God, the Spirit, or Holy Ghost, made this prophetical assertion, which continues, and will remain in force through all succeeding time :-"Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh."

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Moses then concludes the chapter, by adding, what I think, may fairly be called a testimony of the innocence and purity of our first parents; it is this:

"And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."

The absence of shame in a state of nudity, may, I think, be easily accounted for; because man, at the time of which we are now speaking, was immortal, perfectly holy and happy, and the condition of his life incomprehensible to our understanding; and where guilt or sin had in no possible or conceivable sense received an existence, there could be neither cause for, or consciousness of shame.

CHAP. II.

The Serpent deceiveth Eve-Man's Fall-The Punishment of Mankind-Paradise lost.

We now arrive at the deplorable defection of our first parents, or the fall of man, and the ruin of our race. The colloquy between the woman and the serpent is sufficiently familiar to readers generally, so that the insertion of the whole does not appear to be absolutely necessary, and I am apprehensive of expatiating too largely on a subject which in itself would justly seem to demand an entire treatise. I therefore think that it will be found commensurate with the present occasion to treat as matter of detail and comment, those indisputably necessary occurrences which led to the entrance of sin and death at the same moment into our world, and which induced the eternally-begotten Son of God, "whose goings forth have been ever of

old, from everlasting," to declare in virtue of the prescience of his own eternal Divinity, his own purposed incarnation, anterior to the creation of the first-made man; for it is the assumption of his and our bodily and human nature, infolded in the enigmatical word, "image," which principally constitutes the subject of this work, at which I am anxious to arrive, having already spoken of the distinct persons, but co-equal divinity, of the Triune Godhead.

Moses, in his inspired account of the fall of man, sets out with a declaration of the amazing subtilty of the serpent above that of any of the beasts of the field, and which we are told thus addressed the woman:-"Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? The woman answered, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die." This expression shows us how fully and extensively apprised the woman was of the pernicious and damnatory nature of the forbidden fruit; for she does not confine her sense of guilt, and the punishment consequent thereon, to the act of

tasting only, but further asserts that simply touching the fruit would assuredly entail the punishment of death upon man. To this truth the serpent, who "was a liar from the beginning," replied by a mendacious contradiction of the Creator:-"Ye shall not surely die ;" and then, with specious guile and hidden subtilty of purpose, tells the woman that God knew that they should be as gods, by knowing good from evil; and further, by implication, added, that God was desirous of keeping this vast and desirable extent of knowledge from them, to the end that in this particular they might not be like or equal unto himself. The woman, considering from this discourse that the tree was good for food, and as it possessed an agreeable appearance, and was a tree to be desired to make one wise, ate of the fruit, and gave of it to her husband, who with herself became a partaker of their common transgression and iniquity; and, behold "their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked," and became fully aware of what it was to be wise beyond what had been commanded them. They saw that they had forfeited and lost that immortality in which their Maker had

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