word――“Pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day” (Mat. 24: 20). When the Roman armies should bring down the judgments of the Almighty upon the doomed city of the murderers of Jesus, his followers must flee to the mountains across the Jordan; yet let it be their prayer that they might not be compelled to flee either in the severity of winter’s cold, nor on the holy Sabbath. Flight for life might be morally admissible even on this sacred day; yet it would be most appropriate to pray that God would spare them this moral trial and not subject them to the necessity of labor on this holy day.――――In these various ways our Lord most fully and undeniably re-endorsed the Sabbath as for all time. CHAPTER VI. THE EVENTS OF EDEN. THE first human pair have their first earthly want met by their Maker in a _home_――a quiet, beautiful spot (precisely _where_ we know not, but near the source of the great Euphrates) in which trees of beauty for the eye and of nutritious fruitage for subsistence supplied some pleasing occupation for the mind and wholesome labor for the hand; where, happy in each other’s love and blessed with the freest communion with their Maker, not a thing was lacking to fill their cup of joy. _If_ it might only _last_――and for this, nothing more was needful save that their moral nature should be cultured, their faith and love and obedience strengthened up to the point of being thoroughly, fully confirmed: then their lot would have been most blessed. As a requisite means for such culture, God subjected their faith and obedience to one gentle test――to one point of moral trial. To have endured this successfully would have made them morally stronger and have drawn them yet nearer in love and trust to their Great Father; but to fall before it――Ah! this is the experience of human life, but too well known in its fruits of sin and woe! The history of these scenes is before us in this third chapter of Genesis. Our leading inquiries may fitly take the following order: I. Is this description _symbolic_ or _historic_; _i. e._ symbolic of all human sinning; or historic as to this first sin, its antecedents and immediate consequents? II. _The moral trial_; III. _The temptation_; IV. _The fall_; V. _The first promise_; VI. _The curse_, being the first installment of the great penalty upon transgression.