deception he had practifed on Eve, God caufed him to crawl upon the ground: "Upon thy belly fhalt thou go," faid the Lord, "and duft shalt thou eat all the days of thy life." And left Adam and Eve fhould eat of the tree of life, as they had done of the tree of knowledge, and by that means fecure to themselves immortality, he expelled them from the garden of Eden, placing on each fide of the gate, through which they paffed, armed cherubims, to prevent a poffibility of their return. How humiliating and afflictive must this expulfion have been to them!-banished for ever from that delightful spot where they had tafted of ineffable and uncloying happiness !— from a garden, in which uncultured grew the goodlieft trees, loaded with the faireft fruit !a lovely landscape, fanned by the purest air, and infpiring delight and joy!-Such was the place from which this unhappy erring pair were driven, to wander down into a lower world, a spot, to their late refidence, obscure and wild, and where they were doomed to fuffer toil, anxiety, and pain. Thus Thus fell the firft-created pair; and they have left to their defcendants, at .once, an awful example of the ruinous confequences attending a wilful difobedience to the commands of the GREAT SUPREME, and an unparalleled instance of The Mutability of Fortune. INSTANCE INSTANCE THE FIRST. ADAM AND EVE *. In the first page of ancient writ we scan HE most fingular instance on record, of THE the mutability incident to the fublunary ftate of man, is to be found, according to the Mofaical fyftem, in the first pair of human beings that were placed on our globe; as if defigned to be at once a fuperlative, as well as the premier specimen of it. After God had created the heavens and the earth ;—had divided the light from the darknefs, and the dry land from the sea ;-had caused the plants, herbs, and trees, to spring * Genefis, chap. i, ii, iii. Jofephus's Antiq. of the Jews, Book i. chap. 1. Milton's Paradife Loft, Book iv. and xii. out of the earth;-had adorned the heavens with the fun, moon, and stars, and appointed them their various motions and courfes ;had created the living creatures of every fpecies, male and female, after their kind; he then formed man from the duft of the ground, and inferted into him a spirit and a foul. To this first-created human being was given, by its Divine Fabricator, the name of ADAM, which in the Hebrew tongue fignifies one that is red, he being formed out of red earth; for of that colour is virgin or pure earth: and it may be fuppofed, that as God formed this his mafter-work after his own image, he created him as perfect as the nature of fuch a being would permit :---a creature, not prone and brutal as other creatures, but erect in ftature, with front ferene, in whofe looks divine the image of his glorious Maker fhone, and endowed with fanctity of reafon fuited to govern all the inferior orders. God having created Adam, he presented to him the animals he had before formed, and gave to them thofe names by which they are ftill distinguished. A mute attention marked |