first love. Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the Churches; to him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." (ii. 1—7.) God did again plant "the tree of life" in our world, and we have only to eat of it to be again in paradise. He reinstituted the Divine freedom to partake of it. (Esther i. 3, 5, 8, ix. 29-32; Matt. xxvi. 26, 27.) And thus He is now saying to the Christian Church by Ezekiel, "Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God." "Jesus answered and said unto her, If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water."

As I have said before, if the first two chapters of Genesis give us the history of the stupendous work of creation, of what God has done, this third chapter gives us the true, dire history of what the devil has done; and the evidence of it remains around us,-ruin and death, death, death! Therefore we come to the just conclusion that it is but just a type of what had gone before, of that which we behold in the bowels of our earth. However the fearful and unbelieving may try to explain away facts, to me the fact of two fossil skeletons of men having been found in the Island of Guadaloupe, in the chalk deposit, the stratum below the Tertiary, is

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sufficient evidence that they were human beings of the Tertiary period. I do not believe they could have been embedded there, drifted from the Adamic world. The Tertiary stratum is 1,800 feet thick; the chalk, or limestone, 6,000. It is far more likely they were of the pre-Adamic race so clearly revealed to us in Revelation; and that they lived where now rolls the broad Atlantic. One of these skeletons is in the Royal Cabinet at Paris, the other in the British Museum. Reader, go and see it for yourself.

Nobody but God Himself could have given the history of creation; nor could anybody have added to it, as in the case of the later interpolations made by Moses, because nobody knew anything. There was none to tell the tale; and it is quite absurd to think that God gave a second history, one perfectly at variance with the first, for on the sixth day all things were made before man, whereas, on the first day of our heptarchal kingdom, Adam was formed, and all other things after him.

It is a pity that this teaching of a preadamite human race should not be received as a revealed truth, for it is impossible that the record of the sixth day creation of man can be the same as the record of the forming of Adam, of man, the link that had been lost. When I enquired of the warder in the British Museum for the preadamite man, he stood as aghast as though I had been the preadamite man himself.

I say, then, John was taken in spirit back to the seventh day of rest, and from it proclaimed seven more days, even our

world's physical and spiritual history. Creation and life by "the Word" lay in the seven days of the past. Redemption, life by "the Word made flesh," regeneration, and glory by the Spirit, lay in the seven days of the future. And I will maintain, restoration and restoration were still proclaimed in the future. (Rev. xx. 7, 8, xxii. 2.) "Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not." After which "there shall be no more curse." What difficulty can there be in these revelations, when it was "the Spirit of Christ" who made them?

I cannot do better than close this short chapter, which contains in it the two great fundamental truths which we alone require to know, man fallen, Christ risen, an "Angel of the waters" to give life. And under serious physical derangement I have found that this doctrine is not only one to write upon, but to die upon. It is a glorious sight to see Him, in this early dawn of our own day, thus come forth upon the arena of conflict and of conquest; and thus, I say, I cannot close this chapter better than with the sublime exclamation of St. Paul, as he pondered over this doctrine of death and of life, in all its vastness, in all its eternity-"Thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ." And yet the Conqueror's words seem to overarch even these: “If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."

CHAPTER IX.

ON THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

"AND Adam knew Eve, his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the Lord." (iv. 1.) Poor Eve, she thought she had gotten the promised seed, Deliverer, Redeemer. Perhaps it was this hope and joy of the mothers in Israel our Saviour referred to when He said, "She remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world." Poor Eve, she did not know that she had gotten the fruit of her sin, the seed of the serpent, a being with the evil qualities of the devil, a liar, and a murderer. How finite is our conception of sin, of God; instead of the promised One, four thousand years must roll on, multitudes be lost and saved, redeemed and damned, before the Holy Seed should tread our earth; before the wound of her sin was stanched; and then thousands of years more, before the Blessing of the New Covenant had done His work, and given to the earth rest. Poor Eve! "I have gotten a man from the Lord." The literal translation would be, “I possess a man, even JEHOVAH:" meaning, the promised seed.

When this

"And she again bare his brother Abel." spiritual man was born, the first type of Him who was to fall beneath the murderer's stroke, there was not a word from Eve, not a prayer, thanksgiving, nor an expression of faith, or hope; without doubt these were all fixed upon Cain. Did not God rightly name the nature of evil "Darkness, * Night"? (i. 5.)

"And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground." The pastoral life was eminently a holy calling from the earliest period; perhaps the blood of sacrifice consecrated it holy, while labour was a part of the curse. "The Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken."

"And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but to Cain and to his offering he had not respect." Here we see that the Divine Theocracy in the antediluvian dispensation was precisely the same as in the Jewish; Adam and Abel were priests to God; their service and their liturgy were one of blood; and God accepted their prayer. This fact tells us how much must have transpired between God and man in the founding of that first Church that was not written; the truth that He employed the same typical ceremonial to set forth the promised Redeemer of the world is enough for us to know. "The Lord had respect unto Abel