My reply therefore to the new inquiry, above admitted, is this: God by the mouth of Moses speaking in the passage before us designed to set forth the hope of that future and eternal life which Adam, if he had continued in his innocency, would have enjoyed after this present animal life. As if Moses had said, Man became a living soul; not merely in the sense of that life which beasts live, but in the sense of that life which God afterwards designed Adam to live, even without any animal life at all. And this same hope of immortality or an immortal life, we now have through Christ. Although on account of sin we are subject to death and all kinds of calamity. But Adam's natural life, when he became a living soul, was designed to be far exalted above that which we now live since the fall. He would have lived on earth sweetly, happily and with the highest pleasure; and then would have been translated at the time determined in the mind of God, out of the animal life into the spiritual and eternal life; and that translation would have been attended with no pain or trouble whatever. Whereas we are not translated out of this animal life into the life spiritual and eternal, but by death; and that, after an infinity of evils, perils and crosses. It was after this manner that we ought, like the holy prophets, diligently to look into all these expressions of Moses, and to inquire why it is that, with such depth of purpose and design, he speaks concerning man in terms so different from those he used when speaking of all other living creatures. The design evidently was that our faith and hope of immortality might be confirmed, and that we might be assured that although the life of man as to his animal life is like that of all other living creatures, even of brutes, yet that he possesses a hope of immortality unpossessed by, and wholly unknown to, any other living creature; that he possesses and bears the image and similitude of God, with no particle of which any other animal is dignified or favored. And thus by a most beautiful allegory, or rather by a most excellent figure, Moses here intimates, though obscurely, that God would become incarnate. For with reference to man's differing in no respect from a sheep, as to his animal life, though created in the image and after the similitude of God; that assertion is in fact, a kind of statement by contraries, as they term it in the schools; or, according to another term of theirs, an addition by opposition. And yet as man was created in the image of the invisible God, by this sublime fact is signified in obscure figure, as we shall hereafter hear from Moses, that God would reveal himself in this world in the _Man_, _Christ_. These seeds as it were of the greatest and most marvelous things, did the prophets diligently search out and gather from the divine historian Moses. PART II. PARADISE. I. V. 8. _And Jehovah God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed._