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of those, who, ceasing to be directed by reason, were driven from the highest degree of rationality, and ceased to be in a state of paradisiacal bliss.

176. SUPERSTITION was the serpent between whose multifarious seed and humanity the Creator has "put enmity:" the enemy, who, in the retracting steps of man towards his blissful state, has, perpetually, in that bruised "head," retarded his mental cultivation.

177. Whenever the seed of the woman, shall have bruised the "heel" of this hydra, its progress will be impeded: the wounds of humanity will heal; and the hitherto faltering steps of mankind, will be found in their true direction towards their long lost paradise.

178. Thus, a deviation from nature, and a vain aspiration to supernatural knowledge, was the foundation of degeneracy: which entered into the world through superstitious ambition; this was the original sin the ingrafted branch on simple good by which was produced the mixture of good and evil; which brought spiritual death into the terrestrial system, of which corporeal death was

the type; and by which it has been most effectually personified.

179. The acquired knowledge of artificial evil was not left destitute of natural good: the Tree has continued to produce the mixture; in which, even now, good predominates.

180. The tree no longer brings forth its fruit spontaneously, requiring of man to be dressed and kept, only, there is now an additional necessity, that the ground be well tilled and watered to produce good from its stubborn soil.

181. "The sweat" of man is requisite to eradicate the "thorns also and thistles" of which the garden is prolific, leaving the good so confused and dispersed with the evil, as to be sought after with a degree of "sorrow ;" and but with difficulty collected.

182. This labour is sanctified, as the only means of regaining the original natural good, divested of the artificial and growing evil.

H

ORIGINAL MARKS.

CORPOREAL AND VISIBLE.

THE GOOD MARK.

183. THE Creator having infused a proportion of His power, wisdom, and goodness, and having imparted therewith a re-creative faculty, declared every thing to be "very good ;"-very naturally and consistently conjoined mankind (who appear to have been the only discretional animals,) to "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth" had such a Being chosen a people from among the various nations of the earth, to have fixed the name of God, He would, according to our natural ideas, have chosen a people on whom He had reflected His own attributes, a nation powerful, wise, and good, (in embryo, at least,) who would have had the wisdom to have used their power, in promoting the general good: a nation who would have been "fruitful," and would have

multiplied and replenished the earth with good, and have subdued it with goodness.

184. The individual partiality of the Creator, would have been similar;-for mankind, at the creation, being "very good," and in the resemblance of God, we premise, the similitude would have been the foundation of the subsequent favour of Heaven.

THE EVIL MARK.

185. Scarcely had God, in His own image, created mankind, and consequently pronounced them to be "very good," and declared them "fruitful," than, as if in contradiction, they produced little else than evil: scarcely had he blessed them when they changed the blessing into a curse; or infused "the breath of life," and enjoined them to "multiply and replenish the earth," than the work of devastation was begun ; and that under the pretence of pleasing God: This, originally, to the Creator and Preserver of the Universe, must have been a very inconsistent

ceremony.

186. Yet, the first comparatively innocent religious Rite on record, was immediately imitated by a bloody sacrifice, the effects of which were dreadful.

187. That offering commenced with an inanimate, but was succeeded by an animated victim.

188. To the animated sacrifice, a preference was then supposed to be shewn by the object of adoration,—and thereupon, the rejected slew the accepted devotee.

189. Thus, the first inanimate oblation on record was accompanied by a sacrifice of the brute creation, and was immediately succeeded by a human:-not only by that of a man, but of a brother.

190. Thus Religion, vitiated almost in its source, occasioned the first mortal violence, and parricidal murder.

191. Thus, THE MARK OF BLOOD, as portrayed, was set upon the first-born of the earth; by it the first propitiation on record was polluted; and left no other distinction between the first pair of rival devotees, the favoured and the rejected, than that of the murderer and the murdered.

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