for pardon and grace from the God whom he had forsaken. He had rebelled against God, and he was now to witness the rebellion of the lower creatures against his own delegated dominion. He had let in vanity into his own spirit, when he had ceased to love the Lord with all his heart, and soul, and mind, and strength; and now the same vanity was to rule over the lower creation, and he was to witness on every side the waste and degradation of natural powers, and a sudden blight on the fruitfulness of the earth and on the glory of the skies. His heart had ceased to yield the pleasant fruits of righteousness, and needed the patient toil of long ages of mercy, before any first fruits of gratitude and obedience could be gathered out of a stubborn and sinful race; and now the ground was cursed for his sake, and thorns and thistles, springing up on every side, were to mock him with the lively image of his own guilt and spiritual barrenness. The creature was made subject to vanity, not for its own sake, as though a God of love could delight to shade and obscure the beauty of His own works, but for the sake of man; of man, whose perverseness had broken off creation from its dependence on its Lord, and let in the dark powers of evil to cover it with desolation. And yet this painful servitude was to be only for a time, till man had gained the needful lesson, and the vanity of the creature had forced back his sluggish heart, like the prodigal, and he had renounced the husks of the swine for the better provision of his Father's house. It was made subject to vanity, but only in hope. It was that man, beholding the sentence upon his own sin, might learn the bitterness of departing from God; and seeing it so graciously tempered, and mingled with so much mercy, and the promise of a Saviour, might learn also to return to the God of love, and amidst his sor

rows, indulge the hope of pardon and deliverance. And when at length the work of grace should be completed, and the church of the first-born, ransomed from all the ruin of the fall, should be revealed in the beauty of the resurrection, this hope is to be more largely realized. The lower creation, having then fulfilled its purpose, to reflect back as in a mirror, before the eyes of men, the wretched fruits of their own sin, will itself be redeemed at length from the service of vanity, and will share, according to its own measure, in the recovered liberty and glory of the children of God.

Such is the deeper law which now reigns in the course of Divine Providence, and reveals itself in a thousand forms to the thoughtful spirit. In times of ease and prosperity it may be overlooked and forgotten, and a cold and proud philosophy may cast it aside with disdain; but its reality is ever recognized in all true poetry, that appeals to the deepest feelings of the heart. The solemn fact, that creation is subject to vanity through the sin of man, and images to his spirit its own actual fall from peace and holiness, finds an echo in every part of the works of nature, and speaks to mankind, as with the voice of a spirit from the tombs, in the dark night of affliction and sorrow. It is then that the mourner catches an echo to his sighs in the winds of autumn, and the criminal a sentence on his guilty conscience in the lightning and the storm ; while everything bears witness to him, in such hours of remorse and anguish, that sin has brought a fearful blight over this once perfect, and still fair and beautiful creation.

Nature, besides her original stores, is now filled with deeper treasures of the wisdom of our Lord, while He uses all outward things to minister to the work of re

demption, and makes them subject to vanity, in various forms, that man may learn his own state, and the evil and misery of forsaking the Lord, the only fountain of living waters. The first marks of this great change were after the fall, when the curse began to alight on the other creatures of God. Our great poet has described this effect with his usual power and beauty; and, though his fancy may have supplied the details, we can hardly doubt that the picture is substantially true, and no mere invention of a fertile imagination.

The sun

Had first his precept so to move, so shine
As might affect the earth with cold and heat
Scarce tolerable, and from the north to call
Decrepit winter, from the south to bring
Solstitial summer's heat. To the blank moon
Her office they prescribed; to the winds they set
Their corners, when with bluster to confound
Sea, air and shore, the thunder when to roll
With terror through the dark aërial ball...
Beast now with beast gave war, and fowl with fowl
And fish with fish: to graze the herb all leaving,
Devoured each other, nor stood much in awe

Of man, but fled him, or with countenance grim
Glared on him passing.

How various are the aspects in which the curse on the ground alone is presented to us in the Scriptures, as an image and lesson of moral truth. Is the sin of Judah described to us? It is compared to a noble vine, brought out of Egypt, but now turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine, and yielding only wild and poisonous berries. Is national hardness of heart to be punished? The heavens are made as iron, and the earth as brass, to image, by its obduracy and barrenness, the guilt of its inhabitants. Is the perversion of justice denounced? It is still by figures drawn from the same source, and illustrating the same analogy. "Ye have turned judgment into gall, and the fruit of righteous

ness into hemlock." A solemn inquiry is made, whether men have wisdom to discern this connexion between the judicial sterility of the land, and the spiritual barrenness and obduracy of its inhabitants. "Who is the wise man, that may understand this, for what the land perisheth and is burned up like a wilderness, that no man passeth through? And the Lord saith, Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, neither walked therein." And, when the moral blindness is removed, then also the natural curse is predicted as to pass away. "And it shall come to pass in that day, I will hear, saith the Lord, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth; and the earth shall hear the corn and the wine and the oil, and they shall hear Jezreel. And I will so w her unto me in the earth." "And I will restore you the years which the locust hath eaten, the canker-worm and the caterpillar and the palmer-worm, my great army that I sent among you. And ye shall eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously with you, and my people shall never be ashamed." From the early curse pronounced on Cain, and which extorted the weary complaint of Lamech before the flood, and onward through the sacred history, until the withering of the fig-tree was followed speedily by the moral and political desolation of Jerusalem, the same law of Providence may be seen in continual operation. A fruitful land is turned into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein, and nature is made a perpetual mirror, alike to reveal the free bounty of our God, and to image before our eyes the fearful evils that reign and triumph in the hearts of sinful men.

How deep and various is the wisdom implied in this

law of moral discipline, which all nature fulfils under the guidance of our Lord! What treasures of knowledge were required for these different and opposite ends of the Divine government, so that the fruitfulness of the soil may illustrate the free bounty of God, and its sterility may teach a wholesome lesson to the stubborn wickedness of men. "By watering he wearieth the thick cloud, and he scattereth the bright cloud; and it is turned about by his counsels, that they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world in the earth. He causeth it to come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy." Three varied forms of holy love have thus to be harmonized in the daily course of the elements, as they minister to the abundance or barrenness of the earth's harvests,—the free bounty of God, who delights in the beauty of his land for its own sake, and for the sake of man; the severe discipline of impenitent sinners; and the returning emotions of compassion to weary prodigals, when they plead once more for the mercy of their heavenly Father.

If we turn from the earth, the immediate object of the first sentence, to the air and other elements, the same truth is equally conspicuous. Storms and tempests are like the signs and parables of a fallen creation. They proclaim with a loud voice the anger of God against sin, and the mighty power with which He can punish the transgressor. The voice of the Lord, in these convulsions of nature, is mighty in operation; the voice of the Lord is a glorious voice. It is a message of terror to the guilty conscience, a revelation of the wrath of God from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And hence, when the most upright and perfect of mortals was to be stripped of all pride, and convinced of his own sin before God; when his