e manner ascribed to our early ancestors
in Scripture; and that, in many instances, human speech subsequently
declined far below its original standard.

12. At any rate, let it be remembered that the first language spoken on
earth, whatever it was, originated in Eden before the fall; that this "one
language," which all men understood until the dispersion, is to be traced,
not to the cries of savage hunters, echoed through the wilds and glades
where Nimrod planted Babel, but to that eastern garden of God's own
planting, wherein grew "every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good
for food;" to that paradise into which the Lord God put the new-created
man, "to dress it and to keep it." It was here that Adam and his partner
learned to speak, while yet they stood blameless and blessed, entire and
wanting nothing; free in the exercise of perfect faculties of body and
mind, capable of acquiring knowledge through observation and experience,
and also favoured with immediate communications with their Maker. Yet Adam,
having nothing which he did not receive, could not originally bring any
real knowledge into the world with him, any more than men do now: this, in
whatever degree attained, must be, and must always have been, either an
acquisition of reason, or a revelation from God. And, according to the
understanding of some, even in the beginning, "That was not first which is
spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is
spiritual."--_1 Cor., xv, 46_. That is, the spirit of Christ, the second
Adam, was bestowed on the first Adam, after his creation, as the life and
the light of the immortal soul. For, "In _Him_ was life, and the life was
the light of men," a life which our first parents forfeited and lost on the
day of their transgression. "It was undoubtedly in the light of this pure
influence that Adam had such an intuitive discerning of the creation, as
enabled him to give names to all creatures according to their several
natures."--_Phipps, on Man_, p. 4. A lapse from all this favour, into
conscious guilt and misery; a knowledge of good withdrawn, and of evil made
too sure; followed the first transgression. Abandoned then in great measure
by superhuman aid, and left to contend with foes without and foes within,
mankind became what history and observation prove them to have been; and
henceforth, by painful experience, and careful research, and cautious
faith, and humble docility, must they gather the fruit