XI. ence is, if we act properly ourselves, and keep a right LETTER judgment within us, as well as becoming habits, that each period has and brings its own felicities; and that it will be the fault of human mismanagement, not of created nature and its plan, if infancy, childhood, youth, maturity and old age be not a series of diversified pleasures: each period having its own best suiting and wisely appropriated ones, and altogether composing a noble banquet of rational happiness, partly sensorial, partly moral, and partly intellectual, terminating, if we shall so choose, with that which is divine, and which is meant, ultimately, to be superior to every other. 248 XII. LETTER XII. PARADISE-STATE OF ADAM AND EVE-THE DIVINE COMMAND -THE NECESSITY OF SUCH IMPOSITION. MY DEAR SYDNEY, TUITION-REASONS FOR ITS LETTER HAVING taken this survey of the system of being, which our Creator devised and selected to be that of the human nature, which He chose to place on this our globe; and of its intended qualities, and of the provisions which He made for its moral and intellectual formation while here; let us now proceed to consider the actual execution of His interesting design, in the experienced history of our thus favored race. It was His will, that our order of being should begin with two parents, one of each of the sexes already alluded to, and that from these, in an evermultiplying series of productions, by a continued succession of new generations, all that quantity of human beings should issue, which have since constituted the human population. It was also His plan that these two originating ancestors should begin their existence in a place, in a state, and under circumstances which would not occur to any of their descendants, and which would be but a temporary condition to themselves, and that of a very brief duration. The abode appointed for their first residence and experience, was a selected portion of the earth, whose exact site, from the subsequent changes of its surface, cannot now be satisfactorily ascertained. It XII. had been prepared to be a beautiful garden, where LETTER every thing that was pleasant to the eye and gratifying to the taste, was provided to give delight to their young sensibilities. The abundant produce made labor unnecessary, and precluded all care or inquiry about subsistence. Their food was every where about them as nature's spontaneous produce. Their daily life was the perfection of human happiness on earth, as far as terrestrial things and bodily effects could cause it. Every sensorial enjoyment; agreeable feelings; mutual affection; serene minds; the absence of all anxiety; ignorance of all that was evil; lovely objects of sight; interesting scenery ; their own ever-gladdened spirits; the gentle activities of their limbs and movements; exercise without fatigue, and self-chosen occupations, without need or compulsion; interchange of thought and wishes; innocent gaiety; concurring sympathies; the delights of young knowlege and conversation ever varying, yet ever pleasing, and always kind and courteous, were those elements of gratification which must have attached to the sweetly passing hours, a joyous consciousness of happy existence, and imparted a soothing excitement of intellectual exhilaration. Such means of rational, sportive and tender enjoyment, must have caused the mutually admiring and heart-united pair, to be the image of their God in His felicity, as they were meant to be trained to be, and as all human nature will finally be led to be, in spirit, feeling and temper; in its intellectual improvements, and in highly celestialized principle and character. Such was the first state of mankind, and such will be their ultimate condition in their consummated XII. LETTER formation; but such could not be their durable condition, anterior to the acquired completion of their nature. The child cannot be the man in its infancy, but must progressively grow into the maturity, which constitutes manhood. This principle prevails in all earthly nature. The vegetating seed cannot be the beauteous flower, nor the valuable fruit, which its living principle is ordained to form, and will be always acting to compose; but for the production of which, the intermediate process and all the assisting causes, must indispensably intervene. All animal frames thus expand from their embryo state, into their complete strength and figure. What is true as to all that is material and bodily, is pre-eminently true of human nature, in that attainable beauty, richness and sublimity which it has the capacity to reach, and is invited to aspire to. But its perfection is too grand and too multifarious, and consists of too many elements, to be early or hastily effected. Many ages, a very complicated process, and a continued series of adapted progression, must first ensue: and the fit process must be gone thro, and must have its due and successive operations, before the ennobling result can be accomplished among us. Adam and Eve were but at the commencement of the Divine economy of human existence. They were to its ultimate perfection, what the germinating seed is to the lofty forest. They could no more be, what perfected human nature is meant to be and will become, than their babes at the birth could be as large, mature and dignified as themselves. We ourselves are but in a stage, tho a considerably advanced one, of this evolving series of human progression. But Adam and Eve could no more, in their Paradise, be XII. what their cultivated descendants are now, than these LETTER can transform their fields and cities into a garden of Eden. The first state of Adam and Eve was therefore but their first condition. This would change as they changed, and as all human life necessarily alters to every one, as his individual age advances, from his young paradise in his mother's arms and fondling love, to all the varying scenes of a very different and shifting nature, which accompany the after periods of his diversified life. One circumstance seems obvious to us, when we reflect on the position of our first ancestors; and this is, that their continuation in this desirable abode of beauty and delight, or at least the continuity of their happiness in it and from it, could not but be dependent on the right use they should make of all their faculties, limbs, powers and senses. These are too great, too many, too excitable and too pleasureable, not to need the knowlege and the habit of their due and beneficial regulation. This fact all human experience attests. We perceive its truth every day in ourselves. We must never do whatever we can, or all that we should like to do; nor could any intelligent being, living any where with others, exert or have such a license. No two creatures of mind and sensitivity could live together without mutual selfconstraint. In human beings and in our human world, this truth is incontestable. A wrong, an injudicious, an unregulated use of our body, or of external things, is at this moment as incompatible with health, comfort or character to any one, as it was to Adam and Eve even in their Paradise. The first pair had to be as selecting, careful and self-governed in their enjoyments and |