irreconcileable with the doctrines of the metaphysical school, aware that Christianity has been so mixed up with those doctrines as to be universally considered inseparable from them,-unable, or rather unwilling, to spare the time, and still more loath to take the trouble of searching for the truth where alone it can be found, in the Scriptures;-perhaps not even aware that these contain any thing which they have not already been told, and possibly moved by that secret pride, so common, alas! to all our hearts, which whispers that when we differ from the multitude we necessarily rise superior to it, rush into a disbelief of all religion, natural or revealed, as the only creed (to use a paradoxical term) consonant to reason and their experience.

In the following pages it is intended

1st. To shew from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments what the nature of Man is ;

2dly. To examine such texts as may seem to be at variance with the doctrines here maintained; and

3dly. To point out the reasonableness of those doctrines, and their perfect harmony both with revelation and science, so far as the latter has gone.

CHAPTER II.

Moses' Account of the Creation of Man stated and examined-The Tree of Knowledge the test of Man's obedience The certain Consequences of eating of its Fruit distinctly foretold to him by God. The Serpent, his Temptation, and its success-The immediate effects on Adam and Eve-God's sentences on the Delinquents considered.

Gen. i. 26. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

7.-So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Ch. ii. 7.-And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.

SUCH is the plain, simple, and only rational account ever given of the formation of man. God having, by a series of progressive operations, created a world, and successively stored it with vegetable and animal life, at last forms the being who is to have dominion over the whole,

and out of the dust of the ground makes man in his own image, furnishes him with organs which impart to him (vastly inferior, indeed, in degree, but alike in kind,) some of the qualities of the divine nature, and endows him with life, to be maintained uninterruptedly through the medium of the atmosphere which surrounded him, and of the herbs and fruits with which the earth was stored.

It is of importance to observe, that the expression in ch. ii. 7, which our translators have rendered "soul," is essentially the same as that which in ch. i. 20, 21, 24, 30, they have translated "life." Now such a deviation from the sense of the original was certainly not justifiable, since it makes a distinction between the character of the life given to man, and that bestowed on other animals, where Moses has made none. The words, therefore, which they have rendered "man became a living soul," ought probably, in conformity to the phraseology adopted in ver. 20, 21, 24, 30, ch. i. to have been "man became a being or thing of life." In the marginal reading, indeed, ver. 20, "soul," and ver. 30, "a living soul," is stated to be the Hebrew; but it is clear from the whole context, that the translation of the four former verses, as in the text, is correct, and as Moses, in ch. i. 7, uses the same word to denote the life of man, he could, in this passage

at least, refer only to his animal life.* It is, perhaps, worth noticing here, that this preconceived notion of the two-fold nature of man probably led our translators to render the expression of Moses by which life or a living being is denoted, by a variety of words of different signication. By this I do not mean to throw any imputation on their learning or integrity, since, where they have not the word "soul" in the text, they generally give it as the Hebrew in the margin, but I make the remark merely to shew, that when the minds of even the best and ablest men become imbued with a leading idea, every thing, however opposite in its nature, is made to bend in conformity to it. The Septuagint version, however, (which, as having been made previously to the reception of Gentile fancies into the Jewish creed, must evidently offer by far the best key to the difficult passages of the Old Testament,) with great consistency always translates the word by úxn (sometimes with an added), which term the translators use, I think, in the acceptation of life and sensation, as otherwise in many passages their rendering would be nonsense.

In viewing this account of the formation of

* Vide Dr. Dodd's note on this passage, also Grotius, and Numb. xxxi. 28, where "one soul of 500 of the persons of the beeves, of the asses, and of the sheep," is directed to be levied..

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man dispassionately, and without reference to any supposed knowledge or information gained elsewhere, it strikes one forcibly, that there is not only no direct assertion of an immaterial* and immortal substance being a portion of his nature, but that there is not even any allusion which can be construed to imply the existence of such. The likeness of God in which man was made has been always deemed by the best commentators to have consisted in the resemblance which certain qualities with which he was gifted bore, in a small degree, to perfections inherent in his Divine Creator; and whether these qualities appertained to this supposed immaterial soul, as the commentators assert, or were the effect of the exquisite organs with which man was provided (then, doubtlessly, more perfect than any thing our imagination can picture), the resemblance remains the same, and the description is equally applicable to either case.

But if an immaterial and immortal soul did indeed form an integral portion of Adam, is it not most extraordinary that Moses, "like whom (until Christ) there arose not a prophet in Israel whom the Lord knew face to face" (Deut.

* The words "matter," "immaterial," &c. are, and will be, used in the commonly accepted sense, for the sake of brevity and perspicuity; but the author's assent to the metaphysical definitions and doctrines of matter, mind, &c. is by no means to be thence inferred.