I do not maintain that the death of animals, before or after Adam, was the direct and natural consequence of his transgression. Nay, I am endeavoring to show directly the contrary. But, then, the certainty of man's apostasy might have been the grand reason in the divine mind for giving to the world its present constitution, and subjecting animals to death. Not that God altered his plan upon a prospective knowledge that man would sin; but he made this plan originally, that is from eternity, with that event in view, and he made it different from what it would have been, if such an event had not been certain. If this be true, then was there a connection between man's sin and the death that reigned before his existence; though, in strict accuracy of speech, one can hardly be called the cause of the other. And yet it was, as I maintain, occasioned by man's sin, and shows the wide-spread influence of that occurrence, even more strikingly than the ordinary theory of death. A third objection to this theory is, that it represents God as putting man in a place of punishment before he had sinned; or, at least, in a state where death was the universal law, and where he must die, though he should keep the law of God. There are three suppositions, either of which will meet this difficulty. We may suppose, with Jeremy Taylor, that the death threatened to Adam consisted, not in going out of the world, but in the manner of going. If he had not sinned, the exchange of worlds would have been without fear or suffering, and an object of desire rather than aversion. Christ has not secured to the believer the privilege of an earthly immortality, but has taken away from a removal out of the world all that constitutes death. Or we may suppose, with Dr. J. Pye Smith, that, while man should continue to keep the divine law, he would be secured from that tendency to decay and dissolution, which was the common lot of all other creatures, until the time should come for his removal, without suffering or dread, to a higher state of existence. And that a means of immunity from death existed in the garden of Eden we learn from the Scriptures. For there stood the tree of life, whose fruit had the power to make man live forever, and, therefore, he must be banished from the spot where it grew. Or, finally, we may suppose that God fitted up for man some balmy spot, where neither decay nor death could enter, and where every thing was adapted for a being of perfect holiness and happiness. His privilege was to dwell there, so long as he could preserve his innocence, but no longer. And surely this supposition seems to accord with the description of the garden of Eden, man's first dwelling-place. There every thing seems to have been adapted to his happiness; but sin drove him out among the thorns and thistles, and a cherubim and a flaming sword forbade his return to the tree of life.