of the creature lies in loving obedience and dependence— may be regarded as a prophecy of the moral of man's entire history. Henceforth, no second fall of man, as a sinless being, is possible. His probation, in this sense, can never be repeated.

And the occa

sion of a new stage

festation.

But not on account of his fall was the unof his self-man- folding of the Divine character to pause, or man's career to terminate. His nature, unlike that of any of the animal races which had here preceded him, admits of a prolonged process of development; and, from this point, a new stage of his eventful history was to begin, and a new aspect of the Divine character to be disclosed. According to the poet of Paradise, it was while bending over the stream that Eve first caught sight of her physical beauty; and it is more than poetically true, that it was by falling man first beheld the reflection of his mortal image. While standing as in the vertical radiance of the Divine complacency, he cast no shadow; but his guilty fall revealed him to himself in dark and ominous outline. The fountains of the great human deep were broken up. It was the commencement of a course of self-manifestation which is still in progress.

As the head of a

Man himself was now to become a moral

family. governor, and the new family constitution was to be the scene of his jurisdiction. In a new, an official sense, he was now again promoted to be the image of God; for, within limits, his will is to be law to beings to whom he stands in the relation of subordinate creator. While still charged with the duties of self-government, he was to enter on the high office of forming the character, and pointing to the destiny, of creatures, indebted to him instrumentally for their existence. The scenes of Eden were to be repeated

virtually, and on a small scale, in the circle of the family. The probationer there was now to conduct the probation of others in an Eden of his own; to issue prohibitions and restrain self-will; and to learn new lessons of obligation to his Father in heaven, while encouraging the obedience of his own children.

The family on

in

The Family constitution itself was now, probation. a deep and solemn sense, to be placed on probation. And with the Divine announcement of the promise of a SEED the new dispensation commenced. Not, indeed, that individual probation was at an end. The probation of the first man himself had ended in one form, only to begin in another. As a representative and a sinless. being, there could not be "another fall of man ;" for never again could there be a first man, insulated from all the influences of his race, yet representatively related to the race. Never, in this sense, can probation be repeated. But as the subject of a new economy, which recognizes man as fallen and provides for his recovery, every man is on personal probation. And the institution of the family, as the medium through which the Promise was to find fulfillment, secured the means for rendering such probation successful. The event proved that it had a collective character and function; and a period of time was assigned for its trial. The chief occasion of its failure is specified; and the reprieve of a hundred and twenty years shows that it had, in the Divine mind, its own appropriate fullness of time.” Indeed, to ignore its probationary character, would be to take it out of all vital connection with the two economies between which it stands; and to hold it as purely exceptional. But there are no dropped links in the chain of the Divine procedure.

Period of its probationary

existence.

The period of probation for the Family extended, not exclusively, but specifically, and as a dispensation, from the Fall to the Flood. Not exclusively; for its natural constitution preceded its dispensational form and use. The conjugal union, and the Divine command, "increase and multiply," preceded man's first sin. And being founded in nature, it survives its dispensational application. To the end of time, every family, like every individual, will pass through a probation of its own, with duties and obligations commensurate with its means and advantages. But specifically; for it then existed alone, with no national organizations encompassing it, no governing influences from without to control it. It enjoyed certain peculiar advantages-in the longevity of man, for example-never enjoyed subsequently. And it existed as an all-connected whole: the very root of the great genealogical tree, surviving for nearly a thousand years-a human banyan-tree-gradually taking possession of Central and Western Asia. It was charged with the duties of a dispensation; and the Flood was its judgment-day. The stage of Divine procedure which commenced with the calling of Abraham (popularly, but erroneously named "the Patriarchal Dispensation") supplies a further confirmation of this view. For his knowledge of God, his sacrificial worship, and all that was evangelical in the promises made to him, belonged to the religion of the antediluvian patriarchy. Saved in the ark with Noah, the existence of the whole was once more threatened by the rising flood of post diluvian idolatry. The office of the Abrahamic family was to receive and mark, for a time, the ancient and rescued treasure; while their jealous separation and supernatural guardianship showed that the human family, as a whole, had not only lost sight of its high,

original destiny, but had even become hostile to the means of attaining it.

As a universal dispensation, then, the Patriarchal economy may be regarded as having terminated with the deluge. Soon after that event, its dispensational form began to be absorbed in other modes of government, or entirely subverted from its original design. The prophetic, priestly, and kingly offices fell off from the paternal relation, and even separated from each other. Noah's denunciation of Canaan predicted a condition of society incompatible with the idea of Patriarchal rule. The Divine enactment of a law respecting the murderer, immediately after the Flood,* was an implied impeachment of Patriarchal government, and a virtual institution of magistracy-of an authority extra-Patriarchal. With Nimrod commenced a form of wide-wasting despotism, which defied alike paternal rule and moral law, and acknowledged no superiority but that of brute force. Even where the primitive Patriarchal form was retained-as among some of the descendants of Shem -it could not have been entirely exempt from these external influences. The calling of Abraham, and the promise of Canaan to his posterity, made him prospectively the father of a new economy; while the promise, that through him all the families of the earth should be blessed, retained him in vital connection with the antediluvian dispensation, for it was the original promise of "a seed" renewed in a more specific form.

Its antediluvian state sufliciently known to us.

The constitution of the family is essentially

as fixed as that of the individual. And, owing

* Genesis, ix. 5, 6. By man shall his blood be shed; which the Chaldee paraphrases, "With witnesses by the sentence of the judges shall his blood be shed."

to the unchanging habits of Patriarchal life, not only may the families of Jacob and of Job be regarded as copies of the antediluvian type, repetitions of these copies are still extant among the nomadic tribes of Arabia and the steppes of Northern Asia. However few and fragmentary, therefore, the notices of antediluvian life transmitted to us in the Bible, we need be at no loss to conceive of its great characteristic outlines. But it is with the moral history of that early period that we are chiefly concerned. And in looking for its traces we shall find the few Biblical hints as significant and suggestive as a fossil bone is of the entire skeleton of some extinct species, or as the disinterred fragment of a sphynx is of the proportions of the temple whose entrance it guarded. We shall find striking points of analogy between the fall of the individual and what may be called the fall of the family. And while admiring the frame-work of the domestic constitution-the new garden of the Lord— we shall find the trail of the serpent, the self-willed spirit of the first sin, reappearing in every stage of the period, and with ever-increasing aggravation of consequences; till, at length, Forbearance itself grows weary, and the world's destruction prepares the way for the second birthday of the human race.

civilization.

Patriarchy It is not to be supposed that the Patriarchal adapted only for an early stage or form of government, even if it had answered its high intention, would have continued to exist alone. By itself, it was adapted only to an early stage of civilization. But in the exact proportion in which it fulfilled its Divine design, it would have prepared the way for a larger form of government; a form, for example, akin to that of the Jewish theocracy. And that second form, accomplishing its holy purpose, might only have opened the