SERMON II.

GENESIS III. 8.

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day: and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden.

THERE are many considerations amply sufficient to prove to thoughtful Christians that the earliest chapters. of the Book of Genesis, as all the other chapters in the Bible, are strictly, historically, as a whole and in detail, true. Some of those considerations can only be accurately estimated by scholars; but we all of us can do justice to one particular line of thought, which helps us to hold fast such a belief, and which it is my object to bring before you this evening.

It may have chanced to some of us to have lighted unexpectedly upon an old family portrait. Before us is a likeness of an ancestor, from whom we are directly descended, and whose day of life was parted from our

us.

own by an interval of two or three hundred years. We are at first arrested by the points of contrast between this relic of the past, and our present life. The very frame which holds the painting speaks of another age. The whole setting and colouring of the work is strange to us. The dress, the hair, the formal posture, each contribute to increase our sense of distance from the subject of the picture. The hands certainly are like our own hands, yet they are folded or displayed in a way which would be unnatural to The lines of the countenance have a marked fixedness, a rigidity; and perhaps we involuntarily bethink ourselves of some narrow sphere of thought, or contracted sympathies, which must have cramped the brain or heart of our progenitor. Yet, underlying all these differences, penetrating them, first drawing our attention only partially away from them, and so distracting us, and then finally absorbing it altogether, and throwing the points of difference, fairly and thoroughly into the shade, there is a something which rivets us, which connects us with the portrait, by the fascination of an internal sympathy. At first we cannot plainly say what it is; we are drawn on by a vague undefinable impression. Gradually we analyze that impression; we discover a certain determinate point or points of resemblance; there is an expres

sion in the eye, or a curve of the lip, or a line across the brow, which cannot be mistaken; it is THE characteristic of our family; more or less distinctly it is repeated in all our living relations, here strongly and obviously, there faintly and scarcely with sufficient distinctness to be traced by a stranger ;—but when once we have recognized the correspondence between the quaint portrait of another age and the living type of our own, we do not need to turn the picture, that we may see if it has a name and date at the back; we say at once-"That is one of my ancestors."

Now, something like this is the experience of the great human family, when it looks at that portrait of Adam, the falling and fallen Adam, at the beginning of Genesis. All the setting of that portrait is as far removed from the present as possible. Indeed we can only realize the greatness of the interval by counting up the successive intervening stages. How unlike is human life now to human life in the middle ages! What a difference again between the middle ages and the period of the Incarnation! Or between the date of our Lord's Birth and the age of David or Moses! or, again, between Moses and the early Patriarchs, whether Abraham or Noah! Or, finally, between Noah and our first parent, when man had not yet

made himself at home in the world, and was at the very fountain-head of his history. Indeed, between this primal time and our modern civilization there is so sharp and startling a contrast, that to certain minds, weak of faith, and given to the culture of fancy-theories, the history of Adam reads as if it were merely a higher kind of poetry, with which the rich imagination of a later age had endeavoured to fill up and to decorate the presumed blank of man's earliest history. Any such hypothesis is, of course, hopelessly at issue with a true belief in Holy Scripture as the infallible Word of God, guaranteed by His Wisdom and His Truth. But the existence of such an error is here noted as illustrating the extraordinary distance which is felt to sever us, the men of to-day, from the outward manner of life of our First Parent.

Yet that distance contracts sensibly beneath our gaze till at length it seems to vanish outright, when we turn the soul's eye upon the moral likeness, or rather the moral unity which links us, the children. of the 19th century, to our first natural Parent. If the story of the Fall had been merely shaped or invented by a human poet out of the human traditions around him, or out of the resources of his own heart or head, his Adam would have been idealized. A