with the first tear in her eye,—that she should be suddenly startled by the rattle of a venomous snake in the grass, or the growl of a panther among the trees behind her? or that, when she proceeded to make her toilet at nature's mirror, the limpid lake, she should be saluted by the upraised head of a crocodile, extending his long jaws towards her? Can any one presume, that when the loving pair lay down to their peaceful slumbers, they were kept awake by the hooting of owls, or, if you choose, lulled by the croaking of frogs in the neighbouring waters? We can believe none of these things: they are quite incredible: the mind rejects such conceptions with horror and disgust. Our fancy frees those scenes of beauty and innocence from all such objects. This shows us, that such things have no harmony with the mind of man in a good state,—that they have no correspondence with heavenly, much less with Divine, order.―consequently, that they could not have constituted any part of the creation, when first produced in perfect order from the Divine Mind. We feel altogether assured that these things are not "very good," nor good in any degree, and that therefore they could not have been among those objects of the completed world, which were all blessed and pronounced "very good."
But—this view being assented to, as certainly highly reasonable, and consonant with all our instinctive notions of beauty and order,—the question will at once be asked, whence, then, did these things come into existence—when and how? We will first reply in regard to the time when, and afterwards consider the manner how.
As to the time at which these noxious things, animate and inanimate, came into being,—we think
