they came into the world; nor why they were placed there; nor what they were designed to do; nor what they could do; nor what they ought to do; nor what they ought to avoid. It was absolutely necessary therefore, that God should give them instruction, to a certain extent; but we, who judge only by the limited faculties which we possess, know not how he could have done this, though in his infinite wisdom he might have used other means, unless he had first given them the power of articulation and then a language, that is, a power of understanding certain words or sounds as representing certain ideas. The learned and intelligent Ellis in his essay "On the Knowledge of Divine Truths" makes the following observations (p. 104) on this subject. "God made man an intelligent being, or endowed him with a capacity to receive and know truth; and therefore gave him also the faculty of speech or organs fit to frame articulate sounds, and furnished him with language to enable him both to receive and give instruction; that words, being the signs of internal conceptions or marks for ideas in the mind, he might be capable first of being taught by God and then to teach others or to convey the thoughts of his own mind to another.

"I think it would not be difficult to prove and I shall in other parts of this work endeavour to do it, that the first language was taught by God; or that man, could not of himself have discovered the knowledge of fixing sounds to signify objects, ideas or conceptions, so as to be signs of, and stand for, the reality of things, for the subject of internal operation in his own mind, or make others so exactly understand his thoughts, that the correspondence or least disagreement of these invisible representations of things should be immediately known, or, if this were possible, that it must have been the work of many ages, during which time man had been neither an intelligent nor sociable creature, and so sent into the world for no purpose; for though he had the faculty of receiving knowledge and organs, adapted to form articulate sounds, yet, without language, he could not have received it, he could not have thought, and his several noises had been sounds without signification. For he that could not think, could never substitute sounds for things, or affix sense and meaning to words any more than parrots can, though they frame articulate sounds; because there is no natural connection between sounds and ideas, and consequently language the instrument of rationality

(since without it, our rational faculties had been useless,) must be ascribed not to Man but to God."

God, then, having given to Adam and Eve, as we have supposed, a language, by which he made it easy to hold conversation with them, would, undoubtedly give them afterwards all the information that was necessary for their situation; and the first information he would give them would probably be, to tell them who he himself was, and who and what they themselves were, and their relative situation with respect to him and to each other. He would probably tell them, first, that he was God Almighty, who had existed from all eternity; that he had created the world and themselves, and all that they saw in it; and that they, themselves therefore being creatures, owed to him homage, reverence, and obedience.

This then, having been done directly after the gift of language, (for we can suppose nothing else than that this was done,) God, in order to try these his newly made creatures, commanded them not to eat of the fruit of a certain tree, and annexed a penalty to their disobedience. There was, at this time, when there was only one man and one woman in the world, apparently no

other way of trying their virtue than by some prohibition. God therefore gave to Adam and Eve by means of this prohibition an opportunity of proving, whether they retained that innocence or that image of God in their minds in which they had been created. It appears, that both of them transgressed the command just mentioned, and then it was that they first knew sin, or the difference between good and evil.

If Adam and Eve had been designed to live without issue, there would have been probably no occasion for any other prohibitory laws, because there are crimes which they could not possibly have committed. For example, any law against Adultery would have been unnecessary, because there was only one husband and one wife then living. Again, any law against Theft would have been useless, because all the things then in the world, were their own. But when they had begun to increase and multiply, and when, moreover, moral evil, as we have just seen, had already entered into the world, and when again the nature of the children of Adam was different from the original nature of their father and mother (the former being the offspring of parents who had sinned and the latter having come pure out of the hands of God)

it became necessary, that new light should be given and that laws should be introduced for the moral and religious guidance of mankind; and it was necessary that God should do this himself; first, because he was the Creator and Governor of the Universe, and the being therefore who was to be obeyed; and secondly, because no one knew what was God's own will but himself, nor what was fit to be done for such a purpose. We collect accordingly from the paraphrases of the most ancient Jewish writers on the Pentateuch, that God had frequent intercourse with Adam, that he revealed himself to him as the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe, and that he gave him a number of laws from his own mouth which pointed out to him and his posterity what, as moral agents and responsible creatures, they were bound to do, and what, as such, they were bound to avoid. These laws were communicated by Adam to his children, and being committed to memory by them and handed down by them and others in like manner, they were observed by the Faithful up to the time of the Flood. These laws may be said, therefore, to have contained the preceptive and prohibitory part of the body of divinity of the Church of Adam; and as they were observed