We are told, in ancient story, of a statue, formed with such wonderful art, that, whenever it was visited by the rays of the rising sun, it gave forth, in honor of that luminary, the most melodious and ravishing sounds. In like manner, man was originally so constituted, by skill divine, that, whenever he contemplated the rays of wisdom, power, and goodness, emanating from the great Sun of the moral system, the ardent emotions of his soul spontaneously burst forth in the most pure and exalted strains of adoration and praise. Such was the world, such was man, at the creation. Even in the eye of the Creator, all was good; for, wherever he turned, he saw only his own image, and heard nothing but his own praises. Love beamed from every countenance; harmony reigned in every breast, and flowed mellifluous from every tongue; and the grand chorus of praise, begun by raptured seraphs round the throne, and heard from heaven to earth, was reechoed back from earth to heaven; and this blissful sound, loud as the archangel's trump, and sweet as the melody of his golden harp, rapidly spread, and was received from world to world, and floated, in gently-undulating waves, even to the farthest bounds of creation. To this primeval harmony, a lamentable contrast followed, when sin untuned the tongues of angels, and changed their blissful songs of praise into the groans of wretchedness, the execrations of malignity, the blasphemies of impiety, and the ravings of despair. Storms and tempests, earthquakes and convulsions, fire from above, and deluges from beneath, which destroyed the order of the natural world, proved that its baleful influence had reached our earth, and afforded a faint emblem of the jars and disorders which sin had introduced into the moral system. Man's corporeal part, that lyre of a thousand strings, tuned by the finger of God himself, destined to last as long as the soul, and to be her instrument in offering up eternal praise, was, at one blow, shattered, unstrung, and almost irreparably ruined. His soul, all whose powers and faculties, like the chords of an Æolian harp, once harmoniously vibrated to every breath of the divine Spirit, and ever returned a sympathizing sound to the tones of kindness and love from a fellow-being, now became silent, and insensible to melody, or produced only the jarring and discordant notes of envy, malice, hatred, and revenge. The mouth, filled with cursing and bitterness, was set against the heavens; the tongue was inflamed with the fire of hell. Every voice, instead of uniting in the song of "Glory to God in the highest," was now at variance with the voices around it, and, in barbarous and dissonant strains, sung praise to itself, or was employed in muttering sullen murmurs against the Most High--in venting slanders against fellow-creatures--in celebrating and deifying some worthless idol, or in singing the triumphs of intemperance, dissipation, and excess. The noise