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as we find it is, surely we can at once understand the "nature of the curse, Dust shall thou eat,' that it is, "humiliation shall be thy lot all the days of thy life.""

How true it is that none are blinder than those who won't see! Here we find the lecturer's own solution of the dirteating riddle, and yet he cannot see the streak of light illuminating this sad history, so long bound in the chains of impenetrable darkness.

Dr. Adam Clarke's prodigal expenditure of labour and pains, to prove that this "nachasch" could not have been a cobradicapello, rattlesnake, or boa, is gratefully acknowledged; but not less wonderful is the essayist's own persevering rummage of Scripture and Jewish tradition, subsequently given, to shew that this subtle (intelligent?) creature was truly a crawling serpent, and not actually man himself in the character of a priest.

Nothing but anxiety to establish a foregone conclusion could have led Mr. Christmas off the right track, when he had his Bible before him to shew the path to be kept in threading the maze of the labyrinth.

The solution of this serpent enigma is given by King Solomon in the Ecclesiastes. He says, "surely the serpent "will bite without enchantment, and a babbler is no better."

A "babbler" clearly signifies one of those TONGUE waggers, or book contributors to the theistical tower of babblement or babel, that was designed to elevate the human soul above the great flooding waters of everlasting oblivion, in which they feared to be engulphed with the perishing brutes. When we read in the Psalms of these who have sharpened their TONGUES like a serpent, with adder's poison under or between their lips, we find it refers to men, and not to serpents or evil spirits.

The current hypothesis, that the serpent seducer was a reptile inspired by, or acting as the agent of Satan, an evil spirit or principle is not supported by biblical authority. Nowhere in the Bible is it stated that Satan was one of the fallen angels of God, nowhere is it said that the fallen angels became evil spirits. It is true that evil angels are

spoken of in the Psalms, but as messengers of disease and death from Deity to man. It is recorded in these Psalms that Deity makes his own angels, that is, his messengers and sons to be spirits and flaming fire; but it is an unfounded assumption, not warranted by facts, that Deity is said to go out of his way to confer these prerogatives upon the adversary's angels. Lucifer, spoken of in the Old Testament, is a MAN symbolical of the whole race of men, not of evil spirits. The phrase, evil spirit is an accommodation to the petulant and childish notions of mankind in the infancy of their growth.

The epithets "serpents," and "generation of vipers," were used by both John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth, when they were roused to expressing indignant scorn and abhorrence of the Jewish Pharisees, scribes, and theologians of their day; and when Jesus told his tormentors that their claim to be "elect," or sons of God, was a downright lie, he told them that they were children of the devil, but he did not and could not mean that their forefathers had been generated by evil spirits. Every devil in the New Testament turns out to have been a derangement of the brain or nervous system. The Orientals imagine that all diseases are the operation of evil spirits, and thousands, nay millions, have fancied themselves possessed by a demon, or an evil spirit.

In what is known as the Lord's prayer, the evil one is evidently the stubborn, self-willing, self-wishing, and seeking mind of man, who is the real antagonist, or Satan, of Deity, for the prayer of Satan is, "Every man for HIMSELF, and "God for us all." Here the antithesis between Deity and Satan is broadly marked, for self-will is for self, but Deity confessedly is not for himself, but for all; thus freely surrendering his existence for the commonwealth. The term serpent in Genesis, is derived from oriental mythologies, where it is a prime agent in all theologies. To this day the Hindoos have a notion that the sagacity and long-cherished malice of the deadly cobra, cr hooded snake, is equal to that

The literal Hebrew is: who maketh spirits his messengers; a flame of fire his servants.

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of man himself, and great power, somewhat akin to the gods, and greatly superior to men, is attributed to these reptiles. Serpents have for ages in all Eastern countries been looked upon as mysterious creatures, and have been alternately objects of superstitious terror and adoration, for they were supposed to be endowed with superhuman power, both curative and deadly, and also that they acted as messengers of the gods, and were diviners or foretellers of good and evil. In addition to the above mentioned illustrations of the term serpent, there is the clearly expressed opinion of James, in his epistle, that the poisonous tongue of the serpent is that of man himself, for he says that this member of man's body is an untameable devil, an unruly evil, full of deadly poison, defiling the whole body, and setting on fire the whole course of natural emotions and ideas, and it is the revelation of Satanic mischief. James says that every description of beasts, birds, fishes, and even deadly serpents, have been tamed, but the lying, accusing, scoffing, cursing, tongue of man himself is absolutely untameable, for it is a world of iniquity in itself.

Mr. Christmas then furnishes, in notes, the following explanation of the meaning of the allegorical picture of the two trees, the one of existence and the other of theistical good and evil, that were growing in the garden of Eden.

""Tree of Life.' This was a tree planted in the midst of "Paradise, the fruit of which had the power of preserving "the life of Adam, if he had continued obedient to the "commands of God; but this tree of life was to him a tree "of death, because of his infidelity and disobedience."

The Bible does not warrant such a gross outrage upon logical sense as the above exegesis, that the tree of life was also a tree of death.

The tree of deadly fruit was theology of good and evil, a plant of totally different growth. The tree of life and immortality has nothing whatever to do with knowledge of sacerdotal good and evil. King Solomon says the tree of life is "wisdom," or the procreative word of the Eternal, who made everything by what he calls the breath or spirit of his

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mouth; but with reference to the fruit of the other tree, the king speaks in a tone of sovereign contempt, saying:"Fools eat the fruit of their own way, and are filled (blown "out like wind bags) with their own devices," that is, their own intuitive convictions. Of the theological bricks of the Tower of Babblement, the king says:-" Of making books "there is no end, and much study of them is a weariness "of the flesh."

To argue that the literal fruit of any tree upon earth ever afforded the eaters of it the benefit of immortality, is simply to repeat an old Indo-Chinese or Brahminical myth, that the "peach" among fruits is the emblem of immortality, and that in Hien-Gien or Paradise, the eaters of peaches are preserved from death, the fruit in question being the proper life-sustaining food of the immortal soul.

"Tree of the knowledge of good and evil.' This was "also planted in the midst of Paradise, and it was forbidden "Adam to touch it on pain of death. Gen. ii. 17. Gen. ii. 17. For "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' "It is disputed whether the tree of life, and that of knowledge of good and evil, might not be the same tree, and opinions are divided thereupon, but that opinion which "makes them distinct seems the most probable. Many of "the ancients have taken this whole relation of Moses in a

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figurative sense, and were of opinion that this account "could only be understood as an allegory. St. Austin "thought that the virtue of the tree of life and of the knowledge of good and evil, was supernatural and miracu"lous-others have thought that this virtue was natural to "them. According to Philo, the tree of life represents "piety, and the tree of knowledge prudence; God is the "foundation of these virtues. The Rabbins tell us very "incredible and ridiculous stories concerning the tree of "life, it was of prodigious size, and all the waters of the "earth gushed out at its foot- one could hardly go round it "in five hundred years; perhaps all this is allegorical, but "the secret meaning is hardly worth the trouble of pene"trating into."

SACERDOTALISM THE TREE OF GOOD AND EVIL. 51

Indeed! then how are the fallen angels to be judged? What an extraordinary fact is this undeniable one, that frequently the plainest and most straightforward relation of simple and self-evident truth, is of all others the most difficult for the comprehension of minds carefully trained to shoot round corners, and to see any way, or every way but straight before them. The Bible teaches that the sagacious and intelligent serpent founded his scheme of theistical science upon the fruit or teaching of human consciousness of good and evil, and yet theologians cannot read this riddle because they neither will nor can see that sacerdotalism is itself the fruit of this tree of immortality. This effete system, the angels of God were expressly cautioned to avoid as a deadly lie; but the woman is first polluted by a priest, and subsequently she inoculates her partner with the virus, and so they become conscious of the existence of evil as a principle in nature, and they are no longer clear minded children of natural morality, they are transformed into believers in the superior efficacy of super or contraneutralism. The conclusion will be this, that if evil is really a vital power or principle in the universe, with which natural beings have been impregnated, then mother nature must have conceived good from one generator and evil from another, and thus actually played the harlot.

The fall of the first two witnesses or messengers of God upon earth, cannot logically be said to imply the fall of the entire human race, for they were not all elevated into the same conditioned existence; and since they were not all made immortals, they could not lose that inheritance to which they had no reversionary title, As for any atonement by proxy for the fallen angels, it could not have been offered, much less accepted. They were left to the judgment they had invoked upon themselves, and they were abandoned to sacerdotalism for cure of souls, remaining hidden beneath the dark pall of impenetrable mystery until the approaching judgment of man's effete theology lifts the veil that hides the history of the great tragedy from vulgar gaze.

Knowledge of theistic good and evil, deprived the simple