ker of the double
nature, was the discrepancy to be reconciled? How, in this matter, were
the opposite claims of life and death to be adjusted, or the absolute
_immortality_, which cannot admit of degrees, to be made to meet with
and shade into the _mortality_ which, let us extend the term of previous
vitality as we may, must forever involve the antagonistic idea of final
annihilation and the ceasing to be?

At length creation receives its deputed monarch. For, moulded by God's
own finger, and in God's own likeness, man enters upon the scene, an
exquisite creature, rich in native faculty, pregnant with the yet
undeveloped seeds of all wisdom and knowledge, tender of heart and pure
of spirit, formed to hold high communion with his Creator, and to
breathe abroad his soul in sympathy over all that the Creator had made.
And yet, left to the freedom of his own will, there is a weakness in the
flesh that betrays his earthly lineage. It is into the dust of the
ground that the living soul has been breathed. The son of the soil, who,
like the inferior animals, his subjects, sleeps and wakes, and can feel
thirst and hunger, and the weariness of toil, and the sweets of rest,
and who come under the general law, "increase and multiply," promulgated
of old to them, stands less firmly than the immaterial spirits stood of
old; and yet even they rebelled against Heaven, and fell. There awakes a
grim hope in the sullen lord of the first revolt. Ages beyond tale or
reckoning has this temple of creation been in building. Long have its
mute prophecies in fishes and in creeping things, in bird and in beast,
told of coming man, its final object and end. And now there needeth but
one blow, and the whole edifice is destroyed, God's purposes marred and
frustrated, and this new favorite of earth dashed back to the dust out
of which he was created, and brought, like the old, extinct races, under
the eternal law of death. Armed with the experience in evil of unsummed
ages, the Tempter plies his work: nor is it to low or ignoble appetites
that he appeals. It is to the newly-formed creature's thirst for
knowledge; it is to his love stronger than death. The wiles of the Old
Serpent prevail; man falls prostrate before him; creation trembles; and
then from amid the trees of the garden comes the voice of God. And lo!
in an enigma mysterious and dark a new dispensation of prophecy begins.
Victims bleed; altars smoke; the tabernacle arises amid the white te