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sides, their knowledge of geology, But while I thus speak of two astronomy, natural history, chronology, persons, I would not be understood. and general physics, was much more as making them the sole depositories extensive than we imagine. of all the learning and knowledge of twenty generations of men. In keeping the chronicles of the world, Adam was aided eight hundred years by his son Seth; almost seven hundred by his grand-son Enos; six hundred by Cainan; five hundred by Mahalaleel; four hundred by Jared; three hundred by Enoch; two hundred by Methuselah; and sixty-four by Lamech, the father of Noah, and grandfather of Shem. Shem also, after the deluge, was aided by ten generations of men with whom he conversed; for of the twenty generations of our Lord's ancestors whose history he could give, he had seen with his own eyes, twelve of them. How vast and varied, then, were the stores of tradition, and of personal experience, possessed by this most learned of all the sages of mankind! A fit person, indeed, in the character of the King of Salem and Priest of the Most High God, to bless the patriarch Abraham, the holder of the promises.

Enoch, the father of Methuselah, the most enlightened and perfect man that lived during the first two thousand years of human history, was a most gifted teacher of the science of morals. He taught a future judgment, the coming of the Lord, with ten thousand of his saints, to punish the wicked; and in his translation to heaven, body, soul, and spirit, fortyfour years before Seth, the immediate son of Adam, died, gave an exemplification of the immortality of the saints to all his contemporaries, and to posterity through all generations. At the time of his translation, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah, and Lamech, were all of mature age and reason; so that all the generations between Adam and Noah had the advantage of the dcctrine, manner of life, and translation of Enoch. The origin of the universe and of man, his nature, relations, obligations, and destiny, were, therefore, matters of fact, or direct testimony amongst the antediluvians, and faithfully communicated from the mouth of one individual, corroborated by many concurrent witnesses, into the ears of Shem. Shem, too, became an oracle of the postdiluvians for five hundred years; spending one hundred and fifty years of his life with Abraham, and fifty with Isaac, his son. Thus the entire experience of Adam came to Shem through one individual, and passed through him to Isaac ; so that from the tongue of Methuselah the words of Adam fell upon the ears of Shem, and from the tongue of Shem may have fallen upon the ears of Abraham and Isaac.

The vast knowledge of ten antediluvian generations, with the subsequent details of four hundred years, a period of two thousand one hundred and fifty-six years, is transferred to Isaac through two persons.

But to trace the history of tradition down to Moses: Isaac, it will be remembered, lived long enough with Shem to have learned it all from him. He also conversed not only with Jacob, but for more than fifty years with Levi. Levi told the story to his son Kohath; Kohath told his son Amram; Amram to his son Moses. So that all ancient knowledge reached Moses from Adam down to his own times, a period of two thousand four hundred and thirty-three years, by only six persons!

Meanwhile, the knowledge of the true and only God, and of these cardinal points, was in Egypt from other sources of tradition, when Abraham first reached it. Other branches of the human family took notes of facts and events besides that of Shem. And we know that all the knowledge of Shem, communicated to Jacob, Joseph, and Levi, went down into

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With regard to the correctness and authority of these traditions, moderns generally entertain a very erroneous conception. We suppose them to be of no higher authority than many of the legendary tales of more modern times. But this is owing to our want of a little philosophy, and to our confounding the character of the traditions after the confusion of speech and the dispersion of mankind, with that of tradition, while the world was all of one language and one speech.

Could we place ourselves among the antediluvians while all mankind spoke one language, and then among the postdiluvians, after the confusion of speech, the contraction of human life, and the wide dispersion of mankind over the earth, we should find some data by which to appreciate the all-important difference between the ancient and the most ancient traditions.

Can any one, the least acquainted with human nature, possessing a little of the philosophy of himself, imagine that Adam and Eve would not freely communicate to every son and daughter, to the tenth generation who visited them, all they had orally learned from their Creator, or by subsequent revelation, on the three great questions which human reason and human philosophy frankly confess they cannot answer, viz. What am I? Whence came I? and Whither do I

go? Would not the venerable pair most cheerfully and faithfully narrate their experience to their own offspring |—give a clear and full record of the past-and intimate all their anticipations of the future? With what thrilling interest would they detail the incidents of the patriarchal state, and the sad series of events accompanying and subsequent to their eventful catastrophe!

Or can any one suppose that during the latter centuries of this chief patriarch, when his progeny had grown up into nations, multitudes of the most virtuous of them, even from the remotest settlements, would not continually visit him as an oracle, and learn from his own lips the whole history of time, the origin of the race, and the antiquities of nature herself?

Who of us moderns would not make a pilgrimage half round the globe to see the first man; to look in the face, and to hear the voice of the great prototype of humanity; and to listen to his narration, not only of what he had seen and heard of the Creator himself, or learned in latter days of his works and will; but to hear him relate his conceptions and ecstacies when first the breath of life swelled the purple current in his veins

when wonder, love, and praise struggled within him for utterance, while he gazed upon the Father of his spirit, and the new-born glories of a universe smiling upon him with brighter beams of joy and bliss than ever the rapt vision of the most inspired of human bards has yet conceived!

I say, who of us would not have curiosity enough to encounter toils and dangers of the first magnitude, to have it to tell to our children that we had seen and heard the unborn man-the father of a world-the origin of mankind—and his divinely formed wife-the mother of all loveliness and beauty, of all the grace and excellency, of all the intelligence and taste, of all the delicacy and sensi

bility which have adorned the untold millions of her deceased and living daughters.

We have only to bring the matter home to ourselves to be assured that the whole history of the first nine centuries, which had in it the elements not only of society, but of religion, morality, and all natural science, so far as Adam was concerned (and no man's experience ever equalled his), would have been told by him ten thousand times, and as often repeated by his faithful sons and daughters. This would also be true of Shem and his wife, who stood in a similar relation to the postdiluvian world. They had to tell not only what they heard from Methuselah, Lamech, and a thousand others of the old world, but had the marvellous record of the deluge, by which a world was lost, and a new order of things begun.

Now can there be any thing more obvious than that narrations so often delivered by the same persons, should be engraved upon their memories with the clearness and fidelity of words deep cut in marble, or engraved on plates of brass! No translations or spurious readings could vitiate or corrupt that text, written on the tablets of hale and undegenerate memories, and kept within the ark of the covenant, in the sanctum sanctorum of their hearts.

We need no oracle to declare or to decide, that men walked by faith before philosophy, or that there was no place for speculation or hypothesis during the first two thousand years of time; for who could have been so crazy as to state a hypothesis about the origin or nature, the relations or obligations of man; or about the origin of the universe while Adam lived! or about the deluge or antediluvian state of our planet, while Noah, Shem, or Japhet yet lived! Such a speculation would have been laughed out of society, and excommunicated from the habita

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tions of the sane and rational of mankind.

Some of the events of the first age of the world were, moreover, of such a nature as to attract extraordinary attention; to occasion more reflection and elicit more light than we can fully appreciate. The martydom of Abel, the death of Adam, and the translation of Enoch were of this class. Hence many conversations on the questions, Whither went Enoch? What became of Abel? Why was he slain? Where now is Adam? Of what use is an altar ?-a priest?—a victim? Why count time by weeks? What means the promised seed? What means the threatened bruising of the serpent's head? &c. &c. Among the faithful line of the ancestry of our Lord these were the topics familiar and often discussed.

Hitherto we have spoken of but one line of tradition-that which has given all true light, civilization, and refinement to human nature. But there was, and still is, another line, whence came hypothetical philosophy, ignorance, and barbarity. Cain was the head of his line. Of him it is said, after he had slain his brother Abel, he went out from the presence of the Lord, or from the dwellings of the righteous, and east of Eden settled in the land of Nod. His line is | heard through his descendants, Enoch, Jared, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, and his sons Jabal, and Jubal, and Tubal-Cain, seven generations. Cain founded the first city on earth, called after his son, the city of Enoch. Having gone away from the presence of the Lord, and busied himself in worldly employments to drown reflection, and his descendants all following his example, it is not likely that he would often visit the parental dwelling. The blood of Abel still haunted him, and rendered him in fact a fugitive and vagabond on the earth. His descendants also giving themselves up to animal and temporal pursuits, became distinguished for

their inventions in tent-building, musical instruments, in brazen and iron implements and weapons, and for introducing polygamy and war.

The destiny of man is never a pleasant theme to such spirits; and as guilt is the natural parent of fear and the immediate progenitor of a refuge of lies and hatred of the light, such persons would be at more pains to vitiate the ancient traditions than to preserve them pure and incorrupt. Intermarrying with those on the part of the other line, superinduced the deluge.

After that catastrophe, either through the wives of Ham and Japhet, or from the inherited depravity and corruption of the old world, they again apostatized from God. Ham immediately dishonored himself, and brought upon his family a paternal and prophetic malediction. Japhet, too, removed from the residence of his father, and in their wanderings, and subsequently in the confusion and wide dispersion of their offspring, they lost both their veneration for the paternal customs and traditions concerning their relations, moral obligations, and destiny. Among them the truth began to be mixed up with fable, and so metamorphosed that it lost all its redeeming influence upon these two branches of the family of Noah.

The posterity of Japhet, called by the Greeks Japetus, comprehended the ancient Cimbrians, Phrygians, Scythians, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Iberians, Greeks, Romans —indeed, all the ancient European and northern tribes of Asia, and probably some of the American tribes while the posterity of Ham peopled some portions of Arabia, all Egypt and Canaan, Seba, Shebah, Shinar, much of Africa, and some parts of Asia.

Among these, fable, mythology, and hypothesis began. Oral tradition, much corrupted indeed, continued amongst them till the time of

Hesiod, Homer, and, I might say, to the time of Pherecydes of Scyros, the preceptor of Pythagoras—himself the pupil of Pittacus and the oldest of the Greek prose writers. But as the history of the Greeks consisted of oral and incoherent traditions, kept for thirteen centuries before they had a written history of themselves, little or nothing certain can be known of them, except their original extraction and their plagiarisms on Egypt and the posterity of Shem; for, of all people that ever lived, the Greeks were the greatest literary thieves, and had the best art of concealing the theft.

The word philosophy, and the profession of philosopher, began with Pythagoras, when tradition was involved in doubt owing to the causes already mentioned the contraction of human life to seventy or eighty years, the confusion of human speech, the multiplications and wide dispersion of nations, and especially to that gigantic iniquity, violence, and crime which almost universally prevailed. Polytheism, mythology, hypothesis, scepticism, and licentious manners, were the legitimate fruits of departing from the sacred traditions true and faithfully kept in the line of Seth, Enoch, Noah, and Shem, down to Moses, the divine historian and lawgiver of the Jews.

Thus far the history of the most ancient traditions is placed in contrast with the pretensions of hypothetical philosophy. It remains that we cast a glance of the eye upon two or three points in the human constitution, to ascertain whether man was made to be led by philosophy or tradition in the matters pertaining to the science of happiness; for certain it is, if man was not made to be led by philosophy, in vain she pretends to be his guide.

The question now before us is, How is man constituted as respects the powers of acquiring knowledge? or with what powers of knowing the universe is he endowed? for, as before

as is suited to its nature. So far it is a perfect and infallible rule of life to it, in all that respects its nature and the end of its existence. It may be impaired by physical disease; it may also be deteriorated, but cannot be improved by education. It is as

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observed, the universe must first be known before it can be enjoyed. I ask not what are his powers of retaining knowledge, nor what are his powers of applying or of enjoying knowledge; but what are his powers of acquiring it? With the most liberal philosophers they are four-perfect the first, as the last hour of Instinct, Sense, Reason, Faith. animal or vegetable existence. Some philosophers, indeed, are not gains nothing by experience or obso generous; none, however, give servation; hence the swallow builds him more; and we are willing that her nest, the beaver his dam, the bee its he should appear with all his armour cell, and the ant her cities and storeon—with all his intellectual apparatus houses, as they were wont to do six in full requisition, that we may de- thousand years ago. monstrate that he was made to be led, pre-eminently and supremely, by a power that despoils speculative philosophy of all its proud assumptions, and gives to tradition, in its broadest and fullest sense, a very elevated standing amongst the sources of intelligence accessible to man.

Let us then briefly survey these powers. Instinct has never been definitely and satisfactorily explained by any man. The theories on the subject are innumerable, but speculation and inquiry are as rife as ever. Nothing is decided except that it is a law or rule of life conferred by the Creator on every animated existence, animal or vegetable, by which such acts are performed as are essential to its existence and well-being. But it is of a much higher order in the animal than in the vegetable kingdom, and in some animals it appears to be so nearly assimilated and related to intelligence as to be with difficulty distinguished from it. It is, however, very different from sensation and reason, for it is found to exist where there is neither of them.

In reference to my object, it is enough to say, that by instinct we mean that innate or natural rule of life, which God has written upon, and incorporated with the nature of every animal; by which it is enabled to govern itself, in order to the full enjoyment of all its powers and susceptibilities, and so much of the universe

Now man has little or no instinct; and, in this point, is more neglected by his Creator than any other creature; and would, indeed, perish from the earth the first day of his existence, if left to the guidance of all his instinctive powers-an evident proof that he was not made to be led by it, as the law of his animal, intellectual, or moral existence.

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By sense we mean those external organs, usually denominated the five senses, through which we become acquainted with the sensible properties of all the objects around us. this endowment man is not singular. All terrestrial beings of much importtance to man have as many senses as he. And if, in some of his senses, he is superior to some of them; in others, some of them are greatly superior to him.

But he has intellect he has reason; and this greatly compensates for those inferiorities; and yet there are many creatures that seem to possess it in some good degree; still it is man's great perfection, by which he rises far above the beasts that perish. Some philosophers have almost deified reason, and given to it a creative and originating power. They have so eulogized the light of reason and the light of nature, that one would imagine reason to be a sun, rather than an eye; a revelation, rather than the power of apprehending and enjoying it. But when accurately defined, it

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