the same order of beings has distinguished some with peculiar advantages above the rest, who can lay ought to the charge either of his goodness or his equity? There may have been wise and benevolent reasons with which we are unacquainted for such a proceeding; and it is most rational to infer the mercy, justice, and wisdom of all acts that are resolvable into the sovereign pleasure of an infinitely merciful, just, and wise being. (2.) It is not clear to what extent the serpent's sentence is to be regarded as a real punishment. To punish is to inflict misery; but we do not find any intimation of pain or torture consequent upon the denunciation. The serpent might be deteriorated as to its properties; it might be lowered in the scale of creation; it might be transformed from a shape and appearance the most beautiful in the eyes of man, into a form the most disgusting; and

Korah and his companions were condemned as no longer fit to be applied to a sacred use. This is done in order to express more forcibly the divine detestation of the act, while at the same time we may freely admit that the main weight of the curse undoubtedly fell upon the principal agent, whose doom is mystically expressed in the terms appropriate to a natural serpent. But notwithstanding the intrinsic weight and pertinency of the considerations above adduced in justification of the sentence upon the natural serpent, many persons are perplexed in the attempt to reconcile it with the divine attributes. They see not the propriety of inflicting a punishment upon a brute serpent for the crime of a rational agent. Certain it is, however, that whatever difficulty exists on this score, it is a difficulty equally affecting the allegorical interpretation, since it is alike improper to represent the Deity acting in contradic-all this without any diminution of its tion to equity and benevolence in fictitious as in real history. To attribute injustice to God, even in a fable or apologue is a blasphemy of which no moral or pious author can be guilty. But the difficulties arising from this source may perhaps be in some measure removed, and the sentence freed from objection, if due weight be given to the following remarks. (1.) It may be sufficient to rest the vindication of the transaction solely upon the sovereignty of God, who has a right to dispose of all his creatures in whatever manner he pleases. What they have and are proceeds from his creative will; and he is most assuredly free to take away what he has freely given. In withholding from one that which he has bestow-fallen pair of the divine punishment ed upon another, who will dare to arraign his justice? Who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, why hast thou made me thus?" If the sovereign Creator have reduced any particular species in the scale of being, or in

corporeal pleasures. It will not be pretended that the serpent endured any mental suffering by the change. It had none of the anguish which rends the human heart in the sense of degradation. It had no pangs of conscious disgrace, no anticipation of death; it had the means left of providing its food; it could protect itself from its enemies; and as far as we can perceive, the diminution of its powers brought no diminution of its enjoyments. In what sense then, strictly speaking, was it punished? (3.) Important benefits resulted from the vengeance exercised upon the serpent. It evidenced God's righteous hatred and abhorrence of sin; and was an instructive emblem to the

with which transgression is inevitably visited, as our Lord's cursing the barren fig-tree was designed to teach his disciples emblematically the destructive consequences of not bringing forth fruits meet for repentance. Without this standing monument of the penalty of

subjection and degradation. To what extent this sentence involved the doom of a change in the external form and motion of the serpent, it is not possible confidently to affirm. If the suggestions thrown out in a preceding note respecting the primitive shape and appearance of the creature here employed be well founded, there was doubtless a signal transformation made to pass upon him in consequence of the curse now inflicted. Froin having formerly mov

head and breast elevated above the ground, he was now reduced from this imposing posture, and become in the fullest sense of the term, a reptile, vile and loathsome, and incapable of eating any

sin, they might have flattered them- | shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat. Belves that their criminality in tasting But another phrase for the extremest the forbidden fruit was not very heinous; and that their present degraded state was owing rather to the natural course of things, than to their own wickedness. 'Nothing therefore could more effectually convince them of the heinousness of their guilt, and the certainty of the divine vengeance due to it, than the immediate punishment of tha: creature which was no more than the mere instrument of evil. It was easy for them to infer, if the mere instrument of evil be thus punished, whated by the aid of wings, or with the will become of the real authors and actors?' Delaney. (4.) The sentence of the serpent and its immediate execution may have served too as a typical prophecy of the victory to be obtained over sin, death, and Satan, by our blessed Re-food but what should be more or less deemer. As the literal sense does not mingled with the dust. Still we canexclude the mystical, the cursing of the not strenuously insist on this interpreserpent may have been designed as a tation. The curse might have taken symbol, a visible pledge, of the male-effect without any external change of diction to be visited, in the fulness of shape or aspect, just as the woman's time, upon the prime instigator. Im- pain in parturition, though natural to mediately after the fatal transgression her from the beginning, was made a our first parents would become fully curse by being greatly increased in insensible of their ruin and degradation. tensity. The essence of the sentence They would feel that they had violated was the degradation denounced, and a sacred command, that they had lost in this sense, it was equally applicable their primeval innocence, and had then to the natural and the spiritual serpent. only the melancholy prospect of future Satan was to be cast down from heavmisery. In this situation, trembling en to earth and overwhelmed with everwith apprehension and conscious of lasting disgrace. Rev. 12. 9. It has their weakness, how gladly would they indeed been a matter of doubt how far accept any intimation of mercy from the sentence, 'dust shalt thou eat,' their offended Creator? Such an inti- holds literally true of the common sermation was given in the scene transpir- pent, or whether it is peculiar to him. ing before their eyes. The instantane- But the meaning probably is, that the ous effect of the sentence upon the rep-serpent, in consequence of his creeping tile would be to them a certain pledge on the ground, should of necessity that the promise now symbolically Such must, made would in the appointed time be in the nature of things, be the case. fulfilled. Viewed in this light the dread That other creatures take dust into the visitation upon the instrument of the stomach in some measure may be true; temptation, may be amply accounted but, if it be, it shows no inappropriatefor in perfect consistency with all the ness in this particular of the sentence. divine attributes.- -T Upon thy belly It is not said that the serpent should

swallow dust with food.

15 And I will put enmity be- | seed: it shall bruise thy head tween thee and the woman, and and thou shalt bruise his heel. between thy seed and

r Matt. 3. Acts 13. 10. Mic. 5. 3. Gal. 4. 4.

r

her

7. & 13. 38. & 23. 33. John 8. 44. 1 John 3. 8. s Ps. 132. 11. Is. 7. 14. Matt. 1. 23, 25. Luke 1. 31, 34, 35.

t Rom. 16. 20. Col. 2. 15. Hebr. 2. 14. 1 John 5. 5. Rev. 12. 7, 17.

eat dust alone of, or more than, other creatures; but that it should eat dust, which is certainly the fact. But the phrase has a tropical import. 'Eating the dust' is but another term for grovelling in the dust, and this is equivalent to being reduced to a condition of meanness, shame, and contempt. Thus the prophet Micah speaking of the nations being confounded, says ch. 7. 17, "They shall lick the dust like a serpent,' i. e. they shall be utterly overthrown and made vile, debased, and contemptible.

Such a

between men and snakes. punishment would be utterly disproportioned to the crime; and it would be signally unworthy the divine majesty to array itself in all the terrors of avenging wrath in order to declare so unimportant a fact. Some further and higher meaning then it must have been intended to convey, and what else could that be than a symbolical prediction of Satan's continued hostility to man, and of the final subjugation of his empire in the world by the Redeemer, here pointed out as 'the seed of the woman.' It is clear, however, beyond all contradiction that the sentence does, in the first instance, apply to the natural serpent.- -¶ Between thy seed and her seed. That is between thy posterity and her posterity, as seed is often used for children. By the seed of the serpent is to be understood all wicked men who are called serpents,

15. And I will put enmity, &c. The double sense or twofold application of the terms of the serpent's curse, the one having reference to the instrument, the other to the agent, is to be recognised here also. Nothing is more notorious than the fixed and inveterate antipathy which naturally subsists between man and the whole serpent tribe. A hatred of serpents is apparently inhe-generation of vipers, children of their rent and instinctive in every human breast, and may be considered, as perhaps it was designed, as a shadow of that deeper and more irreconcilable hatred which was henceforth to exist between the seed of the woman and their great enemy, the devil, the old serpent. It could be no present consolation, nor ground of future hope to Adam, to learn that serpents should sometimes bite the heels of his posterity, while they in return, should sometimes trample these disgusting creatures to death. Nor in this can we discover any particular connection or correspondency with the offence; for so dire an apostaey would certainly be visited with some greater vengeance than the antipathy

father the devil; and as the seed of the woman is set in opposition to these, it must necessarily follow, since Eve is the natural mother both of good men and bad men, that it denotes a limited portion of the human race, including first and chiefly the Lord Jesus Christ, who in allusion to this promise is called by way of eminence the seed, Gal. 3. 16, 19, who came 'to destroy the works of the devil,' Heb. 2. 14. 1 John, 3. 8, and secondly, all the members of Christ his true people, the sincerely pious in every age and country. These constitute the spiritual body here called the seed of the woman, and they all bear the most implacable hatred to the wicked one, while he on the other hand is ac

16 Unto the woman he said, I and thy desire shall be to thy will greatly multiply thy sorrow husband, and he shall rule over and thy conception; " in sorrow thee. thou shalt bring forth children :

17 And unto Adam he said, | ground for thy sake; in sorrow Because thou hast hearkened shalt thou eat of it all the days unto the voice of thy wife, and of thy life; hast eaten of the tree a of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: b cursed is the