e who passes through
life absorbed with its wants and its artificialities, and regarding
with a "brute, unconscious gaze" the grand revelation of a higher
intelligence in the outer world. It is only in an approximation
through our Divine Redeemer to the moral likeness of God that we can
be truly happy; but of the subsidiary pleasures which we are here
permitted to enjoy, the contemplation of nature is one of the best and
purest. It was the pleasure, the show, the spectacle prepared for man
in Eden, and how much true philosophy and taste shine in the simple
words that in paradise God planted trees "pleasant to the sight," as
well as "good for food." Other things being equal, the nearer we can
return to this primitive taste, the greater will be our sensuous
enjoyment, the better the influence of our pleasures on our moral
nature, because they will then depend on the cultivation of tastes at
once natural and harmless, and will not lead us to communion with and
reverence for merely human genius, but will conduct us into the
presence of the infinite perfection of the Creator.

The Bible knows but one species of man. It is not said that men were
created after their species, as we read of the groups of animals. Man
was made, "male and female;" and in the fuller details afterwards
given in the second chapter--where the writer, having finished his
general narrative, commences his special history of man--but one
primitive pair is introduced to our notice. We scarcely need the
detailed tables of affiliation afterward given, or the declaration of
the apostle who preached to the supposed autochthones of Athens, that
"God has made of one blood all nations," to assure us of the
Scriptural unity of man. If, therefore, there were any good reason to
believe that man is not of one but several origins, we must admit
Moses to have been very imperfectly informed. Nor, on the other hand,
does the Bible any more than geology allow us to assign a very high
antiquity to the origin of man relatively to that of the earth on
which he dwells. The genealogical tables of the Bible may admit of
some limits of difference of opinion as to the age of the human world
or aeon, and also of that of the deluge, from which man took his second
point of departure; but they do not allow us to put the origin of man
farther back than that of the present or modern condition of our
continents and the present races of animals. They therefore limit us
to the modern or