every stage of guilt, necessary to show that his condition was as hopeless as his character was godless. Nothing remained "but a certain looking for of judgment."

How it sub

manifestation.

Still,

How, then, did the time of its continuance, served the Divine and the manner of its termination, subserve the great and ultimate end-the Divine manifestation? Its continuance illustrated the all-sufficiency of the long-suffering of God, inasmuch as he did not terminate it until man had completed his guilty experiment. From the moment he attempted to be happy without availing himself of the Divine method of restoration, his doom was virtually sealed; for the longer he persisted in his course, the more effectually was he denaturalizing himself. The violence which came to fill the earth, was but an outward picture of the violated state of his own constitution. though "He who seeth the end from the beginning" foresaw this, unless man himself had been allowed to make experimental proof of his own insufficiency; unless he had been suffered to exhaust his last device; he would never have known, in the only sense in which knowledge avails him, that he was without strength." True, the minute particulars of that prolonged effort are unknown to the post-diluvian world; for, owing to the material difference. of our situation-if only in relation to longevity—the knowledge could have been only of very slender advantage to us. Accordingly, we know only that which immediately concerns us-that the family dispensation enjoyed, during the antediluvian period, peculiar advantages for answering the great end of its existence; but that, in oblivion of that end, and in the assertion of its own self-sufficiency, it never ceased to wrestle with the laws of its constitution, though every struggle diminished its strength, until it had reached

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the last stage of moral debility, and even of social disorganization.

Now, if man could have foreseen that so long a period would have elapsed before that stage would be reached, hist natural inquiry would have been-Can it be possible that God will wait for its arrival? The event proved that it was possible. Divine long-suffering was sufficient for it. Under each subsequent economy, God himself has referred to his patience with the antediluvians as an illustration of his forbearance. And, in eternity, when the history of the Divine procedure will be seen and studied in all its minuteness and fullness, it will doubtless appear that long-suffering waited till the last unit was added to the sum of human guilt; that it went even beyond, and illustrated the sovereignty of the Divine patience.

But if this extension of the period of antediluvian probation illustrated the sovereignty of God, it may be added that its termination at a certain point exemplified the Divine equity. Strict equity would have admitted of an earlier termination of that economy; but, in consequence of that compensative and remedial arrangement contemplated in the first promise and in the institute of sacrifice, it did not require that termination till the family constitution had passed through all the conditions necessary to convict it of its inveterate self-will, and of its hopeless insufficiency for itself. Till then, the sovereignty of God had reigned, and had availed itself even of the last moment. But when that moment had come, sovereignty itself, being based on equity, gave place to the requirements of justice. The "fullness of time" had come for man's deserved punish"And the Lord said unto Noah, come thou and all thy house into the ark." And Noah went into the ark.

ment.

"And the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the flood-gates of heaven were opened." That signal illustration of the moral government of God left no part of the universe with which man had to do in the same state in which it was before. It changed the moral relations of the whole. All the multitudes who had lived and died in selfwilled disobedience it convicted of the deepest guilt, and ratified their condemnation.* All who, like Abel, Enoch, and Noah, exercising faith in the promise of God, had obeyed His will, and suffered persecution for obeying it, were now justified in what they had done; for here God himself was "making bare his arm” and responding to their confidence. That holy will itself, so long resisted and despised, was now taken out of the dust in which it had been trampled, and vindicated in a manner which brought the world to the bar of judgment. While the Divine manifestation, so long obstructed in intention, by that self-willed race, beheld, in their removal, an open path for another stage in its onward course.

* Heb. xi. 7.

THIRD PART.

THE REASON OF THE METHOD AND OF THE HISTORY.

CHAPTER XVIII.

SECTION I.—THE REASON WHICH BELONGS TO MAN'S CONSTITUTION AND INVOLVES HIS WELL-BEING.

ALL the preceding laws respect the method The law stated. of the Divine procedure, in connection with

the new remedial and family constitution. The reason for this method is now to be considered; or the law which leads us to expect that the beings to whom, and by whom, the Divine manifestation is to be made, must be constituted in harmony with the laws of the objective universe, or that these laws will be found to have been established in prospective harmony with the designed constitution and the destiny of the being who is to expound and reflect them, to profit by and advance them. According to our theory of the Divine manifestation, then, the reason is twofold; the first part being founded in the constitution of the creature by whom the method is to be embodied and illustrated, and involves his well-being; and the second part relating to his destiny, as the means of Divine manifestation by and to himself, and so involving, in addition, the glory of the Creator.*

* Chapter i.

Art and science made possible.

In my illustrations of this part, in the Preadamite Earth, it was shown that while laws of some kind, and therefore method, are indispensable to a creation, quite irrespective of man's relation to it, yet that, in prospect of man's coming, the Creator, in appointing the actual laws of uniformities of the inorganic world, was only saying, in effect: Let the objective conditions of astronomy, physics, and chemistry exist. In appointing the plan of organized bodies, He was providing the objective conditions of botany and of the cultivation of the earth, in its various branches. And in designing the laws and method of sentient being, the external conditions of animal physiology, domestication, classification, and the different branches of scientific zoology, were provided. In other words, the Divine Creator was practically saying: Let all the objective conditions of the various arts and sciences be ready, that when man, the destined minister and interpreter of nature, shall come, the arts and sciences themselves may be possible. All beyond these objective conditions, man was to bring in his own constitution. So that, in giving to the human mind its actual constitution (as we saw, next, in the Treatise on Man Primeval), the Creator was but saying, in effect: Let the subjective conditions of art and science be added to the already existing objective conditions. We saw also that, in adding these subjective conditions, he was adding the materials of a science fundamental to all the rest-the science of anthropology-of man in the union of his animal and spiritual nature or pneumatology and physiology. To the question, therefore, Why man is constituted as he is; Why he reaches the external world through a body, and reacts upon it and upon himself by a mind; and Why he

Anthropology.