Most persons who believe in the doctrine of Original Sin also believe that there is a local heaven, the home of pure spirits, and a local hell, the home of bad spirits--a place "prepared from the beginning for the devil and his angels." Now, if death was caused by the fall of Adam, when were these two opposite spheres created? If they were created with the creation of the universe, or from the beginning, as is affirmed, it follows as a matter of course, for he creates nothing in vain, that the Creator had decided that death should be introduced into the world, and that spirits should take their departure from it. If he had so decided, then the fall of Adam resulted from a necessity beyond his own will, and he could not have been held accountable-moreover, instead of marring the divine plan, as is generally supposed, the Fall was but a connecting link in that plan--and tending, in its ultimate results, if God be infinitely good, wise and just, to the best good.

Again, it is supposed by many that all evil, in whatever form it appears, results from the Fall. Yet there is much, indeed there is every thing to show us that evil would have come into the world even if Adam had not transgressed as he did. As we are constituted it seems to be as necessary

for the growth and increasing vigor of the soul, as is the tempest for the purification of the air we breathe, or fire for the tempering of steel to a proper elasticity. Well has a certain poet said:

"If God no problem set for our unfolding,

Where were the joy, the power, the benefaction
Of toil and faith, and prayer, our spirits molding?
Where were the innocence, without temptation;
Where without freedom were the self-denial?
Where were the triumph, the salvation,

Without the doubt, the danger and the trial?

Though to the mortal eye the immediate results of evil appear bad enough, we may reasonably suppose that its ultimate results will be for the best good of man and the glory of God; indeed we are bound to suppose this if we believe in God's goodness, wisdom, and justice. The belief that he has placed the larger portion of his weak, frail children in this world to toil, and suffer, and die, and to be endlessly miserable in the next because they sin in this, he knowing long before they were created that such would be their hopeless lot, seems utterly inconsistent with every attribute that we attribute to him.

John Milton, and he was orthodox enough, especially in his Paradise Lost, speaks beauti

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fully somewhere in his writings of the mission of evil. It is in his article on the liberty of the press"Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together, almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning semblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermingled. * *As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice, with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is run for, not without dust and heat. That virtue therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excrement

al whiteness." The immortal Spenser describ ing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him with his palmer through the caves of Mammon and the bowers of earthly bliss, that he may see, and know, and yet abstain.

Were there no temptation in the world, there could be no virtue; were there no sorrow, there could be no happiness; were there no sickness, there could be no health; were there no labor, there could be no rest; or if they did exist they would be unknown and unappreciated. It is by contrast only that they appear blessed. As the darkness of night brings out to the eye the stars that were invisible in the sunlight of day, so are they brought out by their opposites. One who has never been sick a day in his life, can know but little of the true value of health and of a sound body-or of that sensation of exquisite delight, or of those emotions of gratitude to God, that follow after a season of sickness and pain.

Beautiful in this world is the ministry of sor row and adversity! It calls forth the most noble and tender traits of our nature. Without it we could have no proper idea of either humanity or love. O humanity! (to borrow an exclamation slightly altered, from Philocles in the

travels of Anacharsis)-O humanity!—generous and sublime inclination, announced in infancy by the transports of a simple tenderness, in youth by the rashness of a blind but happy confidence, in the whole progress of life by the facility with which the heart is ever ready through sympathy to contract attachments! O cries of nature! which resound from one extremity of the universe to the other, which fill us with remorse when we oppress a single human being, with a pure delight when we have been able to give one comfort! Pity, sympathy, love, friendship, beneficence, sources of a pleasure that is inexhaustible! If all which was given to man had been a mere instinct, that led beings overwhelmed with wants and evils, to lend each other a reciprocal support, this might have been sufficient to bring the miserable near to the miserable; but it is only an infinite goodness which could have formed the design of assembling us together by the attraction of a common love, from the trials, adversities and sorrows of this world, and of diffusing through the great associations which cover the earth, that vital warmth which renders society eternal by rendering it delightful!

Thus are we all linked together through the