until the deluge; for a very important purpose, as we shall afterwards see. In the meantime, some remarkable lessons in the faith were given.

Nine hundred years after the creation, and about the same period from the deluge, seven of these patriarchs were alive, in the enjoyment of each other's society at the east of Eden. Death had not yet overtaken Adam, nor have we any intimation, nor any reason to suppose, that it had yet happened, from natural causes, amongst any of his posterity. Yet, even then, when death had not reached him. on whom it was pronounced, and he was now nearly a thousand years old, Enoch calls his son Methuselah-(he dies, and the Lord cometh): certainly an extraordinary instance of the faith which is the evidence of things not seen, as well as the most exact prophecy in respect to time of any recorded in the scriptures.

The situation of the Church at Eden was at this period very interesting; with her seven Elders or Patriarchs, alive and ministering at her altar. Adam dies, and a few years afterwards Enoch is translated that he should not see death; two most wonderful and instructive lessons within so short a period.

But the instruction which the translation of Enoch was calculated to convey, would have been greatly lost, if there had not appeared something before his translation, which would account to the Patriarchs for such a demonstration of the Divine favour in his case. That instructive something was his faith-a faith in Him who is invisible. That

faith was evidenced in the name he gave his son; and, we are warranted to say, it was a faith that respected not only death, but the resurrection and change of the body-for the reward of it was translation-and the reward of faith has always been of the nature of the thing hoped for. Thus did the Patriarchs, within a few short years, witness the execution, literally, of the threatened curse on Adam, and obtain a confirmation of their hope of redemption from it, as explicit in the person of Enoch, as the judgment had been in the person of Adam.

We have not ceased to admire the prophetic faith of Enoch, when we are called to consider an equally wonderful instance of it, in the case of Lamech; who names his son (Noah), and expresses his hope regarding him, with a direct reference to the station he was to occupy, and the work he was to be engaged in six hundred years afterwards.

The station Noah held was so eminent, as a preacher of righteousness or justification, and the work he was to be employed in so great, that his character and fitness for them required to be borne testimony to. As he preached justification, so, to give his preaching weight, he appeared influenced himself by that which he declared-testimony was therefore borne to him as a just man. And as he was to be the first priest in the new world, so he behoved to be 'perfect in his generations'—of the right line from Seth-of the untainted order of the patriarchal priesthood, unmixed and uncontaminated by connexion with the daughters of men.

With Noah the line of the antediluvian elders closes; and although the notices of their history are neither numerous nor lengthy, they are very conclusive regarding the nature of their religious knowledge and belief. We behold them, not only instructed as to the ground of justification before God, and giving lessons in the faith by which, even to this day, they, though dead, yet speak ;but we see the hope of the resurrection and the hope of a change on the human body, so as to fit it to walk with God, so strong, that one of them is rewarded for his faith in this respect, by being taken in the body into those mansions whither Elijah was afterwards in like manner translated.

But, above all, we behold in their history the commencement of that separation between light and darkness-between truth and falsehood-between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, which was to be carefully maintained, openly in the world, until the Great Priest and Prophet arose, perfect in his generations, by whom all righteousness was to be fulfilled. When the time arrived that the book of the generations of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham, had to be made up, it then appeared that God had, from the very first, been preserving that genealogy pure and incontrovertible; so that even at his birth it should appear that He was, indeed, the son promised to Eve, who was to bruise the head of the serpent.

While this was, evidently, one of the grand objects which Divine Providence had in view in the

record which was kept from the beginning; it was no less apparent that, if possible, a still more important purpose was subserved by it.

Sacrifices had, from the first, been offered up by priests, in a line chosen by God; and they were continued in that line till He came who suffered without the gate. In whatever faith, with whatever view, sacrifices might have been brought to the altar, amongst other courses of priests in other nations, the elders first, and 'the twelve tribes instantly serving God day and night,' offered sacrifices plainly of a typical and prospective nature; sacrifices which, when attended to according to the Divine commandment, clearly indicated that all the efficacy they had, was derived from that which was prefigured, and not from any merit of their own.

Nothing could, therefore, more clearly show, that the Lord Jesus was the true victim-that his sacrifice was for the redemption of sins that were past, as well as future; nor any thing more strikingly justify the faith of the elders, than that the Lord, when he was offered, was led to the altar by the hands of priests, descended of, and in the right line of the patriarchs and elders. It most distinctly pointed him out as the antetype of all those atoning sacrifices, by which the sins of the world were typically purged, by those whom he chose to minister to him, from the time of righteous Abel, to the time of Zacharias, son of Barachias, who was slain between the temple and the altar.

CHAPTER X.

THE FLOOD.

ALTHOUGH the testimony from heaven regarding man has always been of a very humiliating nature, yet there appears to have been something preeminently bad in the policy and public conduct of mankind, for some time previous to the flood. The fertility of the earth had, probably, been much greater than it afterwards was, and the air more salubrious;—as seems to be attested by the extraordinary longevity of the antediluvians. That longevity, and the abundance of all things, would naturally tend to make the bulk of mankind reckless of any thing but present enjoyment, and unmindful of the certainty of death. There seems, also, to have been a great disposition to violence, unruliness, and contempt of government;-arising in part, it may be conjectured, from the want of the authority, afterwards given, to punish murder by the death of the culprit.

While these circumstances appear to have induced a state of corruption and violence, among the