flect upon themselves. Such, too,
seems to be the state of those orders of Angels whose life is said to
consist in contemplation--for what is contemplation but a resting in
the thought of God to the forgetfulness of self? Hence the Saints are
described as "Virgins who _follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth_."
But Adam, discontented with what he was, pined after a knowledge which
he could not obtain from without--which he could only have from
miserable experience within--from moral disorders within him, and from
having his mind drawn to the contemplation of himself in consequence of
those disorders. He obtained the wished for knowledge; and his first
recorded act afterwards was one of reflection upon self, and he hid
himself among the trees of the garden. He was no longer fitted for
contemplating glories without him; his attention was arrested to the
shame that was upon him.

What is so miserably seen in the history of our first parents has been
the temptation and sin of their posterity ever since,--indulgence in
forbidden, unlawful, hurtful, unprofitable knowledge; as some instances
will show.

1. I ought to notice in the first place that evil curiosity which
stimulates young persons to intrude into things of which it is their
blessedness to be ignorant. Satan gains our souls step by step; and
his first allurement is the knowledge of what is wrong. He first
tempts them to the knowledge, and then to the commission of sin.
Depend on it that our happiness and our glory, in these matters, is to
be ignorant, as well as to be guiltless. St. Paul says that "it is a
shame even to speak" of those things which are done by the sons of
Belial in secret. Oh, thoughtless, and worse, oh, cruel to your own
selves, all ye who read what ye should not read, and hear what ye
should not hear! Oh, how will you repent of your folly afterwards!
Oh, what bitter feelings, oh, what keen pangs, will shoot through your
souls hereafter, at the memory, when you look back, of what has come of
that baneful curiosity! Oh, how will you despise yourselves, oh, how
weep at what you have brought on you! At this day surely there is a
special need of this warning; for this is a day when nothing is not
pried into, nothing is not published, nothing is not laid before all
men.

2. In the next place I would observe, that the pursuit of science,
which characterizes these times, is very likely to draw us aside into a
sin of a particular kind, if we