too often inconspicuous among those which are generally more sedulously cultivated-and in its growth and productions, being dependent on the visitations of Divine successive influences received and not rejected; whether first bestowed in the way of holy discipline or attractive love. Neither is it enough that such celestial favours should be only passively received, when such measures of power from on high are vouchsafed to the creature, as may be sufficient to enable it both to will and to do according to the Lord's good pleasure.

However small may be the importance attached to the plurality of the noun "lives," toward the establishment of any point of doctrine, the term "breath of lives," may not unfitly serve to convey an idea of that plurality of lives or natures, which evidently appears to have been conferred on man at his first creation; and which may be distinguished by the epithets of his animal, his intellectual, and his spiritual life in close connexion with each other; in the united participation of each of which he was originally formed or endowed.

However difficult it may be to assign to each of these principles or natures its precise boundary,

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with the due distribution of respective properties and faculties, we may define the first to be that life of the body, which, in many obvious respects, man receives in common with the inferior animals of this world, he being derived from the same origin, the earth he was to inhabit; and, as to his animal frame, tending to the same end, that of destruction or dissolution; unless by a further extension of Divine power, as we may suppose in the cases of Enoch and Elijah, it should be transformed and fitted for a higher state without being previously subjected to death.

The second may be denominated man's intellectual life, comprehending all those faculties both rational and sensitive which are of a mental description, and which he enjoys in a degree much surpassing that of the faculties bestowed on the lower order of creatures, or clearly distinguished from theirs, and forming a principal characteristic of the human species; being essential to manhood, whether in a state of exaltation from the influence of a still higher principle, or of degradation from the effects of one that is debasing.

The third life in which man was created, and of which he is still susceptible, is his spiritual

life communicated to him at his first creation, in a state of progressive perfection; but to Adam's posterity only in a seminal or embriotic state capable nevertheless of progressive restoration to its original excellence and perfection, and even of attaining a standard in the Divine appointment, from which there will be no falling any more. *

Hence it is evident that man, as he is considered in an unfallen, or is viewed in a fallen state, is a being of qualifications and endowments, that are very different, and still more widely so, if his state of highest perfection either original or attainable, is contrasted with the lowest state in which he may retain his character as man, while in the body, or with that condition for which he may miserably exchange it after death, if he turn his "glory into shame," by voluntarily persisting in a violation of the terms, according to which the gift of spiritual life and blessedness may be consummated in him.

"Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God; and he shall go no more out."

The formation even of man's body displays, indeed, a superiority of construction to that observable in the highest order of the brute creation; it being designed during his residence in this world, for nobler purposes and offices than any of those assigned to them and hence a style is adopted in the sacred history, in the creation of man, different from that employed in calling other animals into being. Yet some of the properties of this admirable machine, similar to those of inferior animals, particularly the sensual, in man, appear to be possessed in an inferior degree of acuteness to that enjoyed by other animals, which indicates that this is not the seat or scene of his most dignified existence.

If something of a correspondent affinity should be observable between the sensitive properties in man, and those discovered by the inferior animals, it does not fully demonstrate them to be derived from his merely animal or perishing nature: such as love, fear, gratitude, desire, aversion, &c. all which, though they may be exercised toward created beings and mundane objects, are capable also of the strongest excitement and attraction, toward such objects as appear beyond the capacities of inferior creatures to apprehend. For

even if the breath of life, or living feeling and partially intelligent principle imparted to them, may be as little resolvable into any combination of matter or motion, as many writers have endeavoured to prove are the like qualities implanted in man, it determines nothing respecting a future condition in the life of those animals, in whom they appear to be excitable only by objects that have a relation to the present state of being.

The principle indeed which chiefly characterizes the superiority of man, above all other animals of the creation, is the direction of his highest powers to subjects transcending those which are cognizable by the senses, and which principle appears to be accompanied by some mental sense or apprehension, of his being accountable to some unknown power whom it is his interest to propitiate. Of such a principle and its accompaniment, it is certain no vestige is discoverable among the inferior animals, although a process very similar to reason, and strongly indicative of a perfect understanding in things which essentially concern their own temporal existence and even that of others, is observable in many of the most sagacious of them; while the principle of devotion, prompted either by fear or love, is found to subsist among