after the Flood, by Noah and his descendants, and were in force at the memorable dispersion of mankind which took place on the plain of Shinar, and for one or two centuries afterwards, they may be said to have constituted also the preceptive and prohibitory part of the body of divinity of the Church of Noah or of the patriarchal world. Hence they are handed down to us under two different names. Some of the ancient Jewish Commentators alluded to, call them the statutes of Adam, considering them to have been given by God to Adam; and others call them the precepts of the Sons of Noah, considering that Noah carried them over the waters of the flood, and that he delivered them to his children for their observance, and that these delivered them for the like purpose to the new world. Our Divines, when they speak of them generally give them the latter title; but they are not known in the Scriptures by either of these names. The learned Ellis, before quoted, notices them thus. "For as to the universal, equally common law of mankind p. 443, the Jews never were of any other opinion; but as often as they had occasion to mention it, their usual expression was "they were commanded to the Sons of Noah, that is, the whole race of men, and the first man,

Adam, received them from God. For they held, that certain natural laws were, immediately after the creation, declared and commanded to men, which, from divine authority became of perpetual obligation; whence the paraphrase of Onkelos on those portions of holy writ, where Enoch and Noah are said to have walked with God, expresses it, that they walked in the fear of the Lord; and thus they became righteous, because they kept the precepts which were appointed as early as our nature and propagated through all mankind: hence the fratricide of Cain, the abominations of Sodom, and several other facts mentioned in the books of Moses, were wicked and became unlawful before the delivery of the written law."

Let us now see what these laws are reported to have been. I find that there are two versions of them. Our great and learned Selden gives them thus;

1. To abstain from Idolatry.

2. To bless the name of God, or, as some express it, to abstain from Blasphemy, or Malediction of the divine name.

3. To abstain from Murder.

4. To abstain from Adultery, or from the pollution of impure mixtures.

5. To abstain from Theft

6. To appoint Judges to be the guardians of these precepts, or to preserve public justice.

Dr. Echard, in his ecclesiastical history, differs a little, and but a little from the former in his account of them. According to him the duties enjoined were these.

1. To abstain from all Idolatry.

2. To worship the true God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

3. To shed no man's blood.

4. To refrain from unlawful lusts and mix

tures.

5. To shun all rapine, theft and robbery. 6. To administer true justice.

These, it appears, were the laws or moral precepts by which the first race of men were to be governed as to their conduct towards God and towards each other, and which, it is also said, came from the mouth of God himself. They are, as we see, whichever of the two accounts we take or even if we compound them, both few and simple; and the reader cannot fail to observe, that they constitute an half part of the Decalogue or ten commandments of Moses. Few however as they were, they were most impor

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tant as to the great ends for which they were designed. They taught men their relative situation to God as creatures. They made it their duty to worship him, and thus constantly to depend upon him. They guarded against the profanation of his worship by excluding all other gods. They protected his holy name from profanation also; and with respect to the conduct of men themselves in their intercourse one with another, they pointed out, and denounced as sinful, those actions which, if men were betrayed into them, would most disturb the order, peace, and well-being of Society.

That these, or that some such Laws as these were given by God to Adam for the moral guidance of men in the first ages of the world immediately or soon after the Creation, it is but reasonable and consistent with the divine attributes to suppose. Can any man imagine, that God would have set down upon our Earth two creatures, Man and Woman from whom millions of responsible beings were to spring, and not have informed them of their duties, or told them what as beings so constituted they were to do, and what they were not to do? Such knowledge was absolutely necessary for them in the infancy of society, and they could never have discovered it

altogether of themselves. But it is not necessary that we should appeal to our reason only on this occasion or to the commentaries of Jewish interpreters. Every person, who reads his Bible carefully, will find every thing which I have hitherto stated to have come from these Expositors mentioned there.

He will find there, in the first place, that God had oral intercourse with Adam and Eve, and that they must have known that he was God Almighty, the Creator and Ruler of the world, and that they were to worship him as Creatures. The perusal of a part of two chapters in Genesis will furnish him with this information.

He will find there, in the second place, that the men of the Antediluvian times were governed by Laws, to which they looked up as the religious guides of their lives and which they considered to have come from God. Now that God gave to Adam, soon after the Creation, laws for the moral and religious guidance of himself and his posterity, may be inferred from what he himself is reported to have said to Cain on a certain occasion. The occasion was this, "And it came to pass, in process of time, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground and that Abel