should have parts, they would not be created ones. For the Creator, the uncreated Being, could not be composed of creatures. The soul is made, and so made, that it is no part of the divine nature; but only a substance made after the image and likeness of the divine nature; a substance, that is ever to continue united to Him that formed it. This is the meaning of that divine breathing; this is what that breath of life represents to us.

Behold, then, man formed! God forms. also out of him, the companion He is pleased to give him. All men spring from one marriage, in order to be for ever one and the same family, however dispersed or multiplied.

Our first parents, thus formed, are placed in that delightful garden, which is called paradise: God owed to himself to make his image happy.

He gives a command to man, to let him know, that he hath a master; a command relating to a sensible thing, because man was made with senses; an easy command, because He would render his life as comfortable, as it should be innocent.

Man does not keep a precept so easy of observance: he hearkens to the tempting spirit, and to himself, instead of hearkening to God only: his fall is inevitable: but we must consider it in its origin, as well as in its consequences.

God had, at the beginning, made his angels pure spirits, and distinct from all matter. He who makes nothing, but what

is good, had created them all in holiness, and they had it in their power to secure their felicity, by a voluntary submission to their creator. But whatever is derived from nothing is defective. A part of those angels suffered themselves to be seduced by self-love. Woe to the creature that delights in itself, and not in God! it loses in a moment all his gifts. Strange effect of sin! those spirits of light became spirits of darkness: they had no longer any light, but what turned to malicious cunning. A malignant envy now took place of love: their native greatness now was only pride: their happiness was changed into the dismal comfort of gaining companions in their misery, and their former blessed exercises into the execrable employment of tempting men. The most perfect of them all, who had also been the most proud, proved the most mischievous, as he was the most miserable. Man, whom God had made a little lower than the angels*, by uniting him to a body, became an object of jealousy to so perfect a spirit: he wanted to draw him into his rebellion, that he might afterward involve him in his destruction. Let us hear how he speaks to him, and dive to the bottom of his artifices. He addresses himself to Eve, as the weaker: but in the person of Eve, he speaks to her husband as well as to her: Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden†? If He hath made you reasonable creatures, you + Gen. iii. 1.

* Psal. viii.

ought to know the reason of every thing: this fruit is not poison: Ye shall not surely die*: Behold, how the spirit of revolt begins! They reason about the command, and obedience is brought into doubt. Ye shall be as gods, free and independent, happy in yourselves, and wise through yourselves; ye shall know good and evil; nothing shall be impenetrable to you. By these arguments does this spirit set himself up against the order, and above the rule of the Creator. Eve, half-persuaded, looks upon the fruit, whose beauty promised a pleasant taste. Finding that God had united in man a soul and body, she thought, that in favour of man, he might possibly have also annexed to plants supernatural virtues, and intellectual gifts to sensible objects. After eating of this beautiful fruit, she presented some of it also to her husband. hold him dangerously attacked! Example and complaisance add strength to the temptation: he is beguiled into the sentiments of the tempter, so powerfully seconded: a deceitful curiosity, a flattering thought of pride, the secret pleasure of acting independently, and, according to his own inclinations, allure and blind him: he resolves to make a dangerous trial of his liberty, and tastes, with the forbidden fruit, the pernicious pleasure of gratifying his own fancy: the senses mingle their allurements with this new charm, he follows them, he submits to them, and makes him

* Gen. iii. 4.

+ Ibid. iii. 5.

t Ibid. 6.

Ber

self their slave, who was before their mas

ter.

At the same time every thing changes with respect to him. The earth no longer smiles upon him as formerly; he shall have no more from thence, but by constant labour; the sky has no more that serenity of air: the animals, all which, even the most odious and fierce, were wont to afford him an innocent pastime, assume to him hideous forms. God, who had made every thing for his happiness, turns every thing in a moment into his punishment *. He is a burden to himself, who had enjoyed such self-complacency. The rebellion of his senses makes him observe in himself somewhat shameful. It is no more that first work of the Creator, in which all was comely. Sin hath made a new work, that need to be hid. Man can no longer support his shame, and would fain cover it from his own eyes. But God becomes still more insupportable to him. That great God, who had made him after his likeness, and had given him senses, as a necessary help to his understanding, had been pleased to show himself to him under a sensible form: man can no longer endure his presence f. He seeks the deepest recesses of the woods, to hide himself from the presence of him, who formerly was his whole happiness. His conscience accuses him before God speaks. His woful excuses complete his confusion. He must die: the remedy of immortality is

taken from him, and a more dreadful death, namely, that of the soul, is figured to him by that bodily death, to which he is condemned.

But behold our sentence is pronounced in his! God, who had resolved to reward his obedience in all his posterity, the moment he fell from it, condemns and smites him, not only in his own person, but also in all his children, as in the most tender and dearest part of himself: we are all cursed in our first principle: our birth is tainted and infected in its source.

Let us not here pretend to examine those terrible rules of divine justice, by which the human race is cursed in its original. Let us adore the judgments of God, who looks upon all men as one, in him, from whom he means to make all proceed. Let us also look upon ourselves as degraded in our rebellious parent, as stigmatized for ever by the sentence, that condemns him; as banished with him, and excluded from paradise, which he ought to have preserved for our birth-place.

The rules of human justice may help us to enter into the depths of divine justice, of which they are a shadow: but they can never discover to us the bottom of that abyss. Let us believe that the justice, as well as the mercy of God, will not be measured by those men, and that both have effects far more extensive and profound.

But whilst God's severities upon mankind alarm us, let us admire, how he turns our eyes to a more agreeable object. Under