------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] A NATURAL HISTORY OF _SERPENTS_ ---------------------------------------------------------------- PART III. Containing Six DISSERTATIONS. I. _Upon the Primæval Serpent._ II. _Fiery Serpent._ III. _The Brazen Serpent._ IV. _Adoration of Serpents._ V. _Reasons of that monstrous Worship_; VI. _And for the Adoration of different Animals._ ---------------------------------------------------------------- CHAPTER I. CONTENTS. _Various Sentiments about the Primæval Serpent: Some say, ’twas a real Serpent; others say, the Passage is allegorical. Some make the Serpent to be Pleasure; others the Devil in the Natural Serpent. Reasons why_ Adam _was not made beyond a Capacity of Sinning. Our first Parents arm’d with sufficient Power to stand: They knew no Enemy. Satan a compleat Orator. The Fatal Surrender. Satan’s triumphant Return from_ Eden. _Serpent’s Head and Subtility. Intercourse between the Angelick and Human World. A Plea for our first Mother. Why_ Moses _introduces a speaking Serpent. Method of Divine Government. Satan’s View. Reasons why_ Adam _was created in a State of Trial. A strong Negative, sufficient to put the Tempter to flight. The_ Paradisaical _Law guarded by the most powerful Sanction. The Opinion of_ Pagans _and_ Mahometans _about the Fall of_ Adam, _&c. Why Satan punish’d under a visible Figure_, viz. _Serpent_. Christ’s _Death publish’d, before Sentence of Death past upon_ Adam. _The Earth, a secondary_ Paradise. _Moral Reflection._ The Manner of Sin’s first Entrance into our World, is inscrutable: The Subject is an Article of Lamentation, an Article that conducts us to Paradise indeed, but ’tis to _Paradise lost_; whence date the _fatal Æra_ of all human Calamities. There, there in a blissful Field; Sin, the Plague of Hell, made its first Appearance on Earth: but as to the Mode of its Introduction, there is a Spread of impenetrable Darkness over the Face of that great Deep; after the most critical Disquisitions about it, the Difficulty remains unsolvable. Men of Letters may give their Conjectures, but it seems to be one of those secret Things which belongs to him who is unsearchable, and _whose ways are past finding out_; therefore we should rather think, _how to get Sin out of the World, than how it came in at first_: The one would only prove what our Understandings could do, but the other would declare our Hearts, what they ought to be.