124 



M A M M A L 1 A. 



the fall, or moral departure of man from the strict 

 tenor of the divine law, was a necessary consequence 

 of the very constitution of man's nature, and that in 

 order to have remained uniformly in perfect accord- 

 ance with the divine law, he must have been pos- 

 sessed of divine powers, and ceased to be man, which 

 would have been rendering him a totally different 

 creature. 



We do not speak of a particular statute, nor a spe- 

 cific act of disobedience on the part of man. There 

 are so many ways in w hich man can deviate from the 

 law of God, and that law descends so completely to 

 the most minute and momentary portion both of act- 

 ing and of thinking, that it is impossible to get any 

 name or expression at all descriptive of the whole ; 

 and, therefore, upon this, as upon all points in the 

 bible in which it is not possible to express what is 

 meant in direct terms, similitudes must be used, 

 and the meaning of those similitudes gathered from 

 general system. The grand point, however, is, that 

 from the place which man had to occupy in creation, 

 and his perfect adaptation to the occupying of that 

 place, it was quite impossible for him to keep the 

 divine law, or in very many cases to know whether 

 he was keeping it or not. 



It is to be distinctly understood that when we 

 speak of man's keeping the divine law, we make not 

 the least allusion to any merit which man would have 

 had in so keeping it, far less of any service that he 

 would have thereby rendered to God. Irrational 

 nature throughout all its departments, inorganic, 

 vegetable, and animal, yields to the divine law the 

 most perfect obedience ; but it does not thence follow 

 that there is merit in this obedience, because the hold 

 of the law upon it is too strong for being broken ; 

 and it is because the natural law cannot, consistently 

 with the exercise of reason and judgment, have this 

 hold upon a rational being, that man is placed in a 

 situation in which departure from the law is, accord- 

 ing to the soundest judgment that we can form, the 

 inevitable consequence. 



But, though man is not thus placed under the abso- 

 lute dominion of the natural law, as compelling him 

 always to think and to act in that manner which shall 

 contribute perfectly to his well being (for this is the 

 meaning of obedience to the divine law) ; yet he can- 

 not escape from under the power of that law ; and if 

 he is not under it for good, in the sense in which we 

 have used the term, he must be under it for evil, 

 the good in the one case or the evil in the other being 

 wholly to himself, and in no wise affecting either the 

 law or the law giver. It is easy from this to see, that 

 having once deviated from the law in the one form 

 conducive to his perfect good, man was by necessity 

 under the same law in another form, not conducive to 

 his greatest good ; and that, to return from this state 

 to the former, is even more hopeless than the preser- 

 vation of the former, hopeless as we have shown that 

 to be ; for it has the error already committed, in addi- 

 tion to the liability to commit error anew. 



Such, then, is the natural state of man viewed upon 

 principles strictly physiological, and as consistent 

 with the whole system of nature as any one other 

 part of that system is with the rest : man has 

 departed from the law of his God, he has no power 

 of returning, or of keeping the law for one moment of 

 his life ; and, therefore, there is no salvation for him 

 but through one who can partake in the limited under- 

 standing of man, and yet be invested with the powers 



of Godhead, so that he may bring man back to the 

 law and keep him under it, until the days of man's 

 life as a compound being in this world are numbered. 

 This is the grand mystery of the Christian redemp- 

 tion ; upon which it is impossible to enter physiolo- 

 gically ; because one element of it is the eternal Son 

 of God, equal with the Father, and therefore infi- 

 nitely above the reach of all human philosophy. In 

 this world, therefore, the system is of necessity a sys- 

 tem of faith ; but, independently of the direct evidence 

 of the facts, the perfect consistency of its physiology 

 with the nature of man, places it upon a foundation 

 which nothing but headlong ignorance can dare to 

 assail. 



Such as have not been in the habrt of connecting' 

 this subject with the general system and physiology 

 of the works of God, must not suppose that the few 

 observations we have made are out of place. The 

 subject of religion, viewed in itself, and as between 

 man arid his Maker, without reference to human forms, 

 is the most important consideration which the human 

 mind can entertain ; and though it is of too sacred a 

 nature for being introduced upon trivial occasions, and 

 too holy for being prostituted as the cloke of hypo- 

 crisy, yet it ought never to be omitted when the occa- 

 sion harmonises with the introduction of it. Having 

 said this, we shall now proceed to notice very briefly 

 one or two of the leading points more immediately 

 connected with animal physiology. 



In the former part of this article we have made 

 allusion to the principle and the action of animal life , 

 and leaving these words without explanation, it miuht, 

 perhaps, be supposed that we alluded to some distinct 

 existence apart from the material substance com- 

 posing the body of an animal, which that animal pos- 

 sesses. Now nothing is farther from the truth than 

 this. We know nothing of a general animal, which 

 is not any one of the species with which we are 

 acquainted, and yet which includes them all. This 

 was the doctrine of the schoolmen, who in their sys- 

 tems put the wrong end foremost ; by supposing that 

 language, according to all their rules and substitutes, 

 was first invented as a complete system, and then 

 adapted to the objects of observation and the subjects 

 of thought. So far from this being the case, these 

 general words are only abridged names for all the 

 particulars to which they apply ; and, in the case of 

 any one of them, it is more or less general, according 

 to the extent of knowledge possessed by the party 

 using it. A person who had never seen or heard of 

 any but one species of animal a horse for example, 

 would have his general word animal limited to that 

 particular species ; and so also if he had never seen 

 or heard of any but one brown horse, his general 

 w ord w ould have no further meaning than that single 

 individual. It will be in the recollection of many 

 that when sheep and goats were first introduced to 

 the notice of some of the natives of the South Sea 

 Islands, these natives were very positive in declaring 

 them to be birds : and, simple as this fact is, it serves 

 to show how completely the extent of our knowledge 

 limits the real meaning of our words, however we 

 may pretend to use them. 



In this, the proper view of the matter, our word 

 animal extends just as far as our knowledge of what 

 we have resolvfd to call animation ; and when we 

 speak of animal life, we do not use the word life as 

 expressive of some substantive existence which belongs 

 to an animal ; we use it as a general name for all the 



