nature consists in this very thing, that we are careless of God and seek our happiness from His creatures, either from ourselves or others. But He has ordered things so, that this search can never generally succeed; if mankind will not seek their happiness from God, there is a law of their condition which declares that they shall not find it elsewhere.

Now the enjoyment of this happiness in worldly things is mainly hindered, as we can all see, by the necessity of labour and of death. The difficulty of providing for our bodily wants obliges us to labour; we can neither be fed nor clothed without exertion; without such a degree of exertion as exceeds the limits of natural and agreeable exercise. This necessity bearing alike upon both sexes, although in a different way; imposing upon the one labour and anxiety abroad, on the other labour and anxiety at home in the care of a family; manifestly has a tendency not only to abridge what are commonly called the comforts and enjoyments of life, but also, by denying us leisure, interferes no less certainly with the gratification of our understandings by the pursuit of knowledge. We see that the great bulk of mankind have no leisure to improve themselves to any high degree intellectually. But again, when man was sentenced to death, it implied that his body and all his faculties should have a natural tendency to decay and wear out

after a certain time.

Adam may have lived many years after the Fall, yet it is no less true, that the work of death began in him from the very moment when the sentence was uttered that he should die. And so in us all, though we may live out our full term of fourscore years, yet death is working in us, in some measure, from the very hour that we are born. It is true, that when we compare one part of our life with another, it may be said, as I observed not long since, that life is working in the young in comparison with the old; there is in youth undoubtedly so much of growth and vigour. Yet even in youth there are signs of death's working; the disorders which befall infancy and childhood, even the occasional pains, sicknesses, weaknesses, to which the healthiest body is liable, all show that this wonderful machine of our earthly frames is not designed to last for ever; that it has tendencies to decay and disorder which cannot even be delayed for fourscore years without much self-restraint and care. Now this construction of our bodies necessarily limits our powers of enjoyment, no less in mind than in body. Even had we leisure to follow after knowledge to our heart's desire, yet the very imperfections of our bodily frames oblige us to moderate our pursuit of it, or else often cut us off in the midst of it. Thus the span of human wisdom is necessarily limited; for if we so redouble our efforts as to anticipate in

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