without concluding that had it been resorted to at the first, no failure could have ensued, and that it would only be necessary to resort to it now, in order to render the wellbeing of the race secure? Why was the ued after its fail rent? But why was the economy continued even economy contin- after it threatened to fail as a Divine maniure became appa- festation by man? The preceding law—the law of change-is supposed to contain the reason. Man, if treated as a free being, must be allowed a sufficient period for repairing the past by turning to account his dear-bought experience. Had the era of the family economy, in its probationary and dispensational form, been closed while appearances were yet promising, or when as yet they were only doubtful, man would have had whereof to glory," and history would have pronounced the experiment unfinished and unsatisfactory. Had it been brought to an end, even speedily after the instances of failure formed a decided majority, it would still have been fancied that, had space been given to man, those failures might have been converted by him into the very means of his recovery. The force of motives fluctuates with circumstances. The experiment must be varied. Accordingly, no two days of patriarchal longevity were precisely alike. The situation of each patriarch differed from that of every other. Every family had its own distinctive history. Generation differed from generation. The experiment never paused, and was ever varying.* Motives to re In connection with its prolonged duration, covery always on too, two facts are to be remembered: that the accumulating evils attending the family apostasy were always accumulating motives for reformation the increase. * Chapter xvii. and return to God; and that motives to the same effect were added, age after age, by positive Divine calls and interventions suited to the times. So that, at the eve of the deluge, the "preacher of righteousness" had grounds of appeal, exceeding in number and weight those of any previous age. Nor was it until it appeared as if motives became subjectively weak in proportion as they were objecjectively multiplied and strong, that the great experiment was quenched in the deluge. Morally, as an experiment of and for man, it had ceased long before; for other and higher considerations it was high time that it should now cease historically also. SECTION II. THE REASON WHICH RELATES TO THE MANIFESTATION OF THE DIVINE ALL-SUFFICIENCY, AND SO INCLUDES MAN'S DESTINY. Reason of man's well-being. In the preceding section we saw so much of the reason of the Divine method as relates to man's well-being; here, we advance further, and seek for the reason of that well-being itself. There, he might be viewed as an end to himself; here, we regard him as a means to an end beyond. His well-being is necessary, even if he is to be only the means of Divine manifestation to other orders of being-just as the mere animal creation is to us; but if, beyond this, he is to be a manifestation of the Divine all-sufficiency to himself, he must be able to trace his well-being to its source, and to live in the consciousness of his high destiny. And if man's well-being accounts for the existence of the remedial and family economy, his destiny equally accounts for much in the form and method of that economy which would otherwise appear inexplicable. Reason of method. If the constitution of the family is to be construed by man so as to point him to its ultimate design, all the "laws of the method" might be shown to be indispensable. In the entire absence of law it would be impossible for the mind to infer a Lawgiver. In the absence of all signs of a plan, the family would not be known to have a constitution; and, evincing no design, could whisper no hint of the mind which framed it. But the laws of relation and order, of uniformity and analogy, are modes by which the great Pater-familias reflects His mind, and says, in effect: Let such a plan be apparent.* Why its evidence is limited. Why, then, it may be inconsiderately asked, were not these laws made to force themselves, Sinai-like, on man's involuntary notice? Because they were designed to report themselves as the chosen arrangements of a Being infinitely free; and this they could do only as they developed and respected the idea of freedom in man's own nature. Proof of a Divine agency so cogent as to leave man no option whatever as to his conclusions respecting it, would be as unsuited to his moral freedom as the absence of all, or of adequate, proof would be to his rational conviction. The family ar God. If the family did not exhibit marks of arranged to teach rangement, dependent on the will of God, it dependence on would be regarded as proclaiming its independence. Instead of being the means of the Divine manifestation, it would only manifest itself and absorb attention in its own nature. So far from referring the human mind to God, it would literally stand between man and his Creator, and would tend to inclose him in its own mechanism. Here, then, is the profoundest reason which * Chapters vii. viii. xi. xvi. can be conceived of for the law of dependence. Even if man had not sinned, this principle would have been of the highest importance. But the fact that he has not only sinned, but that it was at this very point of dependence that he fell, invests this law with transcendent interest. The question now involved is no less than this, whetherman having violated the law of dependence in his own individual person-there are adequate safeguards against his repeating, diffusing, and perpetuating the same evil in the family? That such safeguards do exist we have shown. In the complementary characteristics of the sexes and in their numerical proportion; in the selected mode for continuing the race, for long retaining the child-in the parental hand, and for securing the possible progress of the species from age to age; in the adaptedness of the region assigned to antediluvian man; in the mutual dependence and instinctive co-operation of distinct families, as well as in the plan for his recovery, direct from Heaven;-in these and other respects, choice and adjustment are every where visible. Every helpless little one that lives on his smile was meant to memorialize him, in the manner most likely to affect him, on the fact of his own dependence. From the first a Voice and a Hand, not to be mistaken, had "called a little child, and set him in the midst of" every family, as a symbol of humility and dependence to all its members. The entire constitution was inter-dependent, and an embodiment of dependence on God. It was a God-like method of saying: Let man have ever before his eyes a welcome symbol and a memorial of my Fatherhood and of his loving dependence on me.* Still, if the right interpretation of the symbol is to be either useful to man or acceptable to God, * Chapter xiv. it must be voluntary. His recognition of his dependence is simply the recognition of a fact, and, as such, adds to his knowledge; but it is the knowledge of his highest moral relation, and as such it involves both his well-being and his destiny more vitally than all his other relations put together. Let the evidence of his dependence sink below a given point, and his ignorance of it would be pardonable; let it rise to the point of compelling belief, and all the moral part of his nature-the very part to which it relates —would be ignored, and its highest end unattained. The ultimate ily teach depond ence. In the absence, again, of all ultimate facts facts of the fam- and necessary truths from the sphere of the family-supposing their absence possibleman might have moved forever in the mill-horse circle of secondary causes, and have blindly regarded it as of unac countable self-origination. But the several arrangements just enumerated were all ultimate facts. By these contingencies the family is characterized and made unique. Man himself did not originate them. They could not explain themselves. Nothing in nature accounted for them. To the listening ear, they distinctly reported themselves as Divine appointments. If man looked behind and beneath. them, he could find nothing supporting them but the will of God. Where was the Fountain of the love which flowed through the family, and which it always scems laboring to express? Whose mind conceived the idea which the family embodies? What Will assigned and maintained the laws which made it what it was? In every conception of what man ought to do, an eternal distinction underlies his sense of duty-the immutable difference between right and wrong. Even on the eve of the flood, man had to take but a few backward steps, in order to reach historically the |