that happiness was lavished upon him by Infinite good

ness.

Thus he had every imaginable inducement to love God with all his heart; and to cease to do so, was to incur an amount of guilt that beggars description and defies conception. But to displace the benevolent God from the throne of his affections, and to yield up his heart to a malevolent demon, was horrible! Not to be grateful to God, when he was so rich in the enjoyment of his favour, so honoured with his image, and so happy under his benediction, was to be guilty of the basest ingratitude. To cease to love Him-in spite of so many obligations and such overwhelming considerations of interest, and so many evidences that his sole concern was to crown him with honour on earth and bring him to glory in heaven-was to be guilty of the exceeding sinfulness of sin. But to disbelieve his Word; to receive the calumnies of the devil; to listen to his blasphemies against the Father of mercies; to transfer his confidence from the God of truth to the father of lies; to deliberately disobey his bountiful Maker; to become his enemy, and to join hands with an apostate, rebel angel, in an unholy and dark confederacy to resist God's law, to oppose his authority, and overturn his government, -was to be transformed into a nature akin to that of a fiend, and to be a partaker of such guilt as hurled Lucifer over the battlements of heaven, and would expose man to the torment prepared for the devil and his angels.

How complete and how terrible was our loss of Paradise! Man's body was lost, and his soul was lost; the favour of God was lost, and lost his image too. Happiness was lost, for holiness was lost. Eden was lost; earth was lost; heaven was lost; all was lost, and lost for ever! No wonder that fearfulness, and trembling, and horror overwhelmed the transgres

sors.

No wonder that the whole creation groaned with condemnation, and that the universe trembled beneath

its enormous load of human guilt. And what marvel that insulted Justice should wet his glittering sword, and raise his hand to heaven, and say, "Shall I not smite them for these things? Yea, verily."

6. The sad expulsion.

"So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims and a flaming sword to keep the way of the tree of life."-Gen. iii. 24.

The terrible doom which the guilty culprits anticipated after their trial and condemnation was such as no language can express. Let us place ourselves, by supposition, in the position of Adam, just at this point of the proceedings. What a train of reflections of the most painful description would crowd into his mind! How well might he have said, "What has not Heaven done to bless me and make me happy? I have been too strong for Omnipotence; I have plucked down ruin. This body, once the perfection of animal mechanism and the very masterpiece of material creation— whose very being was one continual progress in health, and ease, in youth, and beauty, and immortality— must now become a prey to mortality, and say unto the grave, Thou art my mother, and to corruption and dust, Ye are my sister and brother. Beautiful and fair structure of flesh, Thou shalt surely die.'"

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Think also of that spiritual death to which he was now subject, for he was now dead already in trespass and in sin. His understanding was darkened, his memory was defective, his judgment was perverted, his will was stubborn, his conscience was defiled, and his heart depraved; his mental capabilities were a mere wreck of his former greatness, and his moral excellence was totally destroyed. His peace had passed away; his joy had ceased to spring up; his happiness had departed, and his hope had fled.

Nor was this all, no, nor half. deprived of all good, but he was

He was not only filled with evil;

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"Every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil," and always evil-that "continually." Ignorance had taken the place of knowledge, and error the place of truth. The enjoyment of the Divine favour was succeeded by his hot displeasure, and the likeness of God was defaced in the soul of man; yea, and more this, for the image of the beast was there. Guilt, immensely aggravated, lodged in the bosom where pristine innocence once abode; and shame, and fear, and sin, and misery filled the soul, where peace, and confidence, and holiness, and happiness used to dwell. Hate, deceit, and pride had supplanted the principles of humility, truth, and love in his degenerate nature. His heart was a cavern of stormy winds, a troubled sea, yea, and the hold of demons, for Satan was there. The sentence was already pronounced, "Thou shalt surely die;" and, in the spiritual sense, it had taken effect, for he was dead in trespass and in sin already.

But, dreadful as it was to contemplate the temporal death of the body and the spiritual death of the soul, it was still more awful and overwhelming to anticipate the eternal death of both body and soul which was involved in the terrible sentence, "Thou shalt surely die." It was fearful to reflect on the loss of the felicity which our ancestors had enjoyed in their paradise abode; to contemplate the toils and miseries of desert exile; and to look forward to the certain endurance of complicated afflictions in a thousand possible forms, physically and mentally, until death reduced the body to its native dust in the wilderness. But it was still more appalling to feel the sad assurance that the favour and image of God were lost, and that sin and Satan had entrenched themselves in their poor, miserable hearts. These were calamities that exhaust all attempts at description; but this was not all; no, this was not half the amount of the misery that was involved in the terrible doom, "Thou shalt surely die."

Great as was the loss of Eden, with all its joys, it was nothing compared with the loss of heaven, with its far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. The sin that deprived them of the bliss of their earthly paradise, that banished them from Eden, and drove them into desert exile, excluded them utterly from the paradise of God; and the law which denounced its anathemas against them required that both body and soul should be cut off from the enjoyment of God, and be driven away from his presence and from the glory of his power into perpetual banishment, this is the second death.

But more than this, much more than this, was implied in the dreadful doom of the first guilty pair. Though it was much, indeed, to be deprived of celestial happiness, to be driven away from heaven, it was more to be cast down into hell. It was a great privation to be excluded from the society of Michael and Gabriel, and all the happy heavenly hosts; but it was a greater punishment to be tormented for ever with the devil and his angels. To have sacrificed jasper walls, and pearly gates, and golden streets, and to have forfeited thrones, and kingdoms, and crowns of life, was dreadful indeed; but to be transported into the regions of perpetual death, to be always dying, and never die, was still more awful. To be cast into a place which is described as a furnace of fire," 99 66 a lake of fire," a place of fire enraged "with brimstone "-to feel the pain produced by "burning fire," "devouring fire,' unquenchable fire"-to suffer "the vengeance of eternal fire," to be driven away into such "a place," were indeed an awful doom to anticipate; but it was still more dreadful to anticipate the state of torment that awaited our wretched Eden ancestors.

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Theirs was a sentence that involved a state of punishment the most intolerable and insupportable; theirs was a worm that dieth not," as well as a fire that never could be quenched;" a sense of guilt and shame,

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of remorse, and hopeless everlasting despair, gnawing, and devouring, and tormenting the soul, amid the horrors, and curses, and blasphemies of damned, apos tate spirits, whose infernal groans, and hisses, and imprecations against God may make the deep dark caverns of the bottomless pit ring as loudly with cries of rebellion, as the heaven of heavens echoes with hosannas to his name!

And what was most of all distressing and overwhelming in their terrible doom was the perpetuity of their guilt and condemnation, the eternity of their punishment and misery. All these unwelcome associates, all these cutting insults, all these fiendish derisions and these satanic torments-all these are for ever! These pinings of distress, these writhings in agony, these sad recollections and bitter regrets, are world without end! This banishment from God and angels, and from all the bliss of heaven, and this consignment to perdition, are perpetual! All this, dreadful and overwhelming as it is, is for ever and ever! This is ETERNAL death!

7. The wretched wanderers.

"Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field.”—Gen. iii. 17, 18.

Such is the sad sequel of the moral tragedy of Eden. And if such was the aggravated guilt and the terrible doom of our earthly ancestors, where are the words or the figures that will give to us the true idea of the wretchedness and misery that would be felt by them, after their tremendous fall from the highest degree of moral dignity and happiness into the lowest depth of spiritual distress and everlasting ruin? It is said of Mezentious, a notorious tyrant of ancient times, that he found out a method of torturing prisoners taken in war, compared with which the barbarous practices of racking