middle life the full wisdom and knowledge of age, yet these very efforts are in themselves exhausting, and only bring on earlier the period of decay. I may also mention that most painful consciousness which must beset us all, that at that period of life when we have begun to collect large stores of experience and knowledge, when our faculties are at the highest from full exercise, and we have at last gained large materials to enable them to advance yet further, precisely at that time the course of decay begins, and the added experience of longer life is more than counterbalanced by the gradual weakening of the faculties, so that we actually live to see our grasp upon truth become less and less firm, and our distance from perfect intellectual happiness become actually every year greater and greater.

So surely does that imperfect and mixed state of the outward world which obliges us to labour, and that doom of death upon ourselves which is all our life long making preparations for its full execution, render it actually impossible for mankind as a body to find happiness in God's creatures, if they will not seek it in Him. These are things which it does not appear that any power or art of man can remove; the very increase of the numbers of mankind being in itself a constant provision to keep up the necessity of labour. And thus considered, as every day and every hour show

us how really the sentence recorded in Genesis is actually pressing upon us all, so we shall understand how exactly calculated it is to effect its object; and we shall gain a true notion of those points in the constitution of things which some have cavilled at, while others have been so foolish as to deny their existence, if we view them, not as an arrangement of the Divine benevolence to produce happiness, but rather as an appointment of Divine justice purposely made to render the earthly happiness of sinful creatures a thing impossible.

I think it is most useful so to contemplate human life, although the view thus offered may be painful. Yet I know not that it need or ought to be painful : for although happiness in God's creatures if viewed as apart from Him is truly impossible, yet happiness through Him is not impossible, not even in this world. It is very just to look upon life as a scene of trial, and not as a scene of enjoyment. But those very dark pictures of man's misery which are sometimes given are not just if applied to Christians it is by no means true that life is to them unhappy under any circumstances whatever; while under circumstances, it is, and may well be exceedingly happy. For to Christians, whatever pain might be otherwise felt from labour and from decay, is constantly made up by hope; and the very circumstance that they have a more abiding city

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and a better treasure than any on earth, while it enables them to enjoy most thankfully those good things which God gives them here, takes away also that otherwise sickening disappointment with which we should else see them one by one vanish.

To this restoration of happiness, this undoing of the evil done by the tempter at the beginning, the words of the text are in their highest sense no doubt applicable. And they afford a good example, as I said, of that general character of Scripture prophecy which runs through the whole Bible, and in them it may be shown how those prophecies generally may also be understood and applied.

In their first and literal sense they are true and perfectly intelligible. They describe the relations existing between man and a class of inferior and noisome animals; whom he can destroy or keep under, but who are able in their turn to inflict some pain and injury on him. But in proportion as our notions of other parts of the story of the Fall become raised above the literal meaning, so also must they be raised with respect to this particular verse. The instant that we understand by the serpent that tempted the woman not a literal serpent, but a being morally evil, by whose arts the world has been ruined, then of course we understand by the serpent between whose seed and the woman's seed there was to be perpetual enmity, that same being of moral evil with whom man's

life throughout the history of the world would be perpetually struggling.

And when we read, that in this struggle, the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent's head, while it should bruise his heel, it is no less clear, that here also the literal sense of the words head and heel is no longer to be thought of, but that in this great contest between man and evil, the triumph should be with man, although it should not be won but at the price of some loss and suffering.

Now taking it in this sense partially, and up to a certain point, the fulfilments of it have been many. All those good men of whom the Scripture speaks, from righteous Abel downwards, all who by God's grace lived in God's faith and fear, all found that in their struggle with evil they were conquerors; that it was good for them, and not bad, that they had ever been born. And all found also that, if saved, they were saved as by fire; their experience could enough tell them that evil was not without power to do them hurt.

Yet it is no less manifest that none of these cases came up to the full extent of the comfort required. At the Fall, evil had triumphed over the whole race of mankind; the state of things had become evil, which had before been good. If evil, that had done this were to be crushed and destroyed, it must be by the restoration of all things;

the human race must be recovered, which in its first struggle had been lost. And this could only be by a far greater and more perfect victory over evil than ever man had won; by such a triumph over labour and over death as should indeed show that the latter end of the human race should be better than its beginning.

Such a triumph was achieved by Jesus Christ, the proof of it being his resurrection. For thus it was shown manifestly that death had been overcome; that evil had been vanquished in all its parts, outward and inward; that man was again restored to his original righteousness, and that being in the person of Christ no longer lost to God, but one with God, suffering and death could have no dominion over him, but that his portion was the fulness of joy at God's right hand for ever.

In this same manner it is, that so many passages of the Old Testament are applied to Christ in the New Testament, which, taken in their original place, seem to refer to a subject much less exalted. And the reason of the application of them to Christ is this; that whereas all prophecy is addressed to the hopes of the good, and to the fears of the evil, so the perfect fulfilment of it, that is, the perfect satisfying of these hopes, and the perfect realizing those fears, is to be found only in the perfect triumph of good, and the perfect destruction of evil; of both which we have the pledge in