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“ Where life is free, in the third heaven of heavens, where the worlds are 
radiant, there make me immortal ! 
“ Where there is happiness and delight, where joy and pleasure reside, 
where the desires of onr desire are attained, there make me immortal ! ” * 
We agree with. Mr. Muller in that ff we can hardly think of 
Abraham or Moses as without a belief in life and immortality.” 
But, if they had this hope, then their contemporaries and pre- 
decessors also had it ; and we regard the evidence of its ex- 
istence in the earliest generations of men as being equally 
full with that of many other important truths. We must 
remember that it can only be accounted for, at all, as a revealed 
truth. It is incapable of demonstration, and if philosophical 
speculation were able to present many reasons for human 
immortality, yet, as they would, after all, be only probabilities, 
so they could never lead to anything higher than a probable 
conclusion ; from which we cannot account for the universal 
existence of this doctrine up to the first records of human 
thought. The absence of an explicit statement of this doctrine 
in the early chapters of Genesis has never seemed to us a 
proof of the absence or of the obscurity of this truth in the 
earliest times. For we cannot suppose that the brief record 
we have in the first five chapters of Genesis is all that 
was known of God and of His government of man till the 
time of Noah. What has been written has been written, not 
for their instruction but for ours, and, so far as we can see, 
with the special purpose of showing the continuous action of 
the Creator and Ruler with the earth and man from the 
beginning, and of establishing the identity and continuity of 
the race. Yet in this brief and specific record we have these, 
three facts, which plainly imply this knowledge from the first : 
Adam was made in the image of God, which necessarily 
carried his immortality. The first death occurred under cir- 
cumstances which, in the absence of immortality and of the 
knowledge of it as the birthright of every man, must have 
shaken to its foundation the Divine government, as revealing 
His impotence to protect His obedient servants. Then, the 
translation of Enoch, taking place, as it did, at a time when 
men generally were falling under the power of sensuality, and, 
as a consequence, were losing sight of the better life to come, 
was specially calculated to call them back to spirituality and 
God, by forcing the future life on their attention. And that, 
in the days of the Israelitish patriarchs, this was a fundamental 
truth is unquestionable from the simple and every-day mode 
of recording their deaths. They are not represented as ceasing 
* Chips, i. p. 46. 
