error, and persuade them that they were made for something better, that their vices were not constitutional and inevitable, but that they constituted a part of God's creation in the state in which he first constructed it, when he looked upon every thing that he had made, "and, behold, it was very good."

DISCOURSE II.

HUMAN NATURE RIGHTLY CONSTITUTED.

TO EVERY THING THERE IS A SEASON, AND A TIME TO EVERY
PURPOSE UNDER THE HEAVEN.
Eccles. iii. 1.

THERE is more wisdom and truth pervading and underlying this sentence than meets the eye at first glance. It assumes what must lie at the basis of all rational religion, the essential rightness and integrity of human nature. "To every thing there is a season. This amounts simply to the proposition, that God has made nothing in vain, there is nothing superfluous in his works. Infinite wisdom cannot make any thing superfluous. If nothing is made wrong and nothing superfluous, then every thing, in its proper use, is good; for the very definition of the goodness of any thing is, that it is well calculated for that particular purpose for which it is made.

Water, for instance, was declared, by some of the old Greek philosophers and poets, to be the best and most excellent of the elements. They were led to say so, probably, from its indispensable necessity to animal and vegetable life, its power of being removed from place to place, its constituting the sea, which is the highway of nations, from its capacity of being drawn up in a mysteri

ous manner into the atmosphere in the shape of vapor, and then descending in rain where it is needed, and satisfying a prime want, not only of the vegetable world, but of all who breathe the breath of life. It is a wonderful element, and, when considered with reference to the purpose for which it was created, it is perfect.

Other things were created with the power of development, as, for instance, the tree. The first seeds of the first trees which God made, contained the elements and the laws of that particular species of trees to the end of time. They would continue to produce the same tree, each perfect in its kind, for ever. One tree might be mutilated by man, or disfigured by disease; yet it is a universal law, that no such accident shall essentially affect the species. That continues the same, and retains all its powers and capacities. The oak has strength, the pine height and straightness. The apple-tree and most fruittrees are low, spreading, and accessible to man. These characteristics they preserve from age to age unchanged. So it is with the various tribes of animals. The first pairs of each embodied in themselves, not only the type of the physical form of the whole race to the end of the world, but the instincts which corresponded to those forms,—what element to inhabit, when and where to make their dens or build their nests, what food to select ; and those which were destined to a migratory life inherited a spontaneous desire to flee from the approach of winter, and, again, to follow toward the poles the progress of spring.

We have no reason to make man an exception to this universal law. We have reason for believing that the first pair of mankind bore the same relation to their posterity that the first pair of every other animal bore to theirs. They were perfect humanity, so far as constitu

tion was concerned, both physical and mental. No reason can be given why God should put any thing into their constitution which was not good or not necessary, or why he should have left any thing out that would have been ood for them or essential to their perfection and happiness. They might individually pervert their nature, but not essentially change it, so as to transmit a different nature to their posterity from that which they themselves originally possessed. God made Adam's children just as much as he did Adam. Nothing contradictory to this is even hinted in the Mosaic account of the creation. Every thing that God has made is not only good essentially, that is, in itself, but good relatively, adapted in its properties to every thing else with which it has any connection. Thus it is with water, air, and earth. Were it not for the atmosphere, the waters of the ocean could never be carried over the land. The leaves of plants, like living beings, breathe the atmosphere, and without it they could not vegetate. There are animals of every variety of structure, yet each precisely adapted to the position it was intended to occupy, the fish to the water, and the birds to the atmosphere.

And can we suppose that this system of universal adaptation pervades the elements, the animals in all their various tribes, and stops short at man, the noblest work of all, the crown and glory of God's creation? Did not God as clearly foresee the relations in which man was to be placed to his fellow-beings and to God, as he did that the fish was to swim in water, and the bird fly in the air? Man was created to be a moral agent. It is not probable that an omnipotent, all-wise Being would withhold from him any power or faculty which is necessary to a moral agent.

Duties must arise

out of mutual relations, as, for instance, the parental. God foresaw this relation, and is it credible that he, who adjusted the quills of a bird with the greatest possible amount of strength and lightness, left the mind of man without the power to perceive the parental duties, and without the sense of obligation to perform them when they were perceived ?

Man was created with the power of speech. The object of speech is the communication of truth. Would he create man with power of communicating truth, and not give him the sense of obligation to communicate the truth alone? Surely not.

Again. He created man to possess property, and made it essential to the well-being of society, that individuals should have the power of appropriating each one something to himself. And did he leave this power

unguarded by a sense of moral obligation? By no means. The same moral sense which teaches me that I may have property myself, forbids me to invade the property of another. "Thou shalt not steal," says the Mosaic decalogue. That commandment did not put the instinct of property into human nature. If it had not been there, then the word steal would not have been intelligible. That commandment, then, was only a ratification of a law which had existed before in the moral nature of man. God had made man, in the first place, in such a way as to perceive that to take what belongs to another without his permission was wrong, and men had called it stealing before the promulgation of the Mosaic law. These moral duties of mankind arose, not out of arbitrary enactment, but out of the relations which men sustain to each other, and God made men to see those relations, and feel the obligations which arise out of them.