With respect to restoration from any such fall.  There seems a remarkable prior probability for it, if we take into account the empty places in heaven, the vacant starry thrones which sin had caused to be untenanted.  Just as, in after years, Israel entered into the cities and the gardens of the Canaanite and other seven nations, so it was anteriorly likely, would the ransomed race of Men come to be inheritors of the mansions among heavenly places, which had been left unoccupied by the fallen host of Lucifer.  There was a gap to be filled:  and probably there would be some better race to fill it.

THE FLOOD.

Themes like those past and others still to come, are so immense, that each might fairly ask a volume for its separate elucidation.  A few seeds, pregnant with thought, are all that we have here space, or time, or power to drop beside the world’s highway.  The grand outlines of our race command our first attention:  we cannot stop to think and speak of every less detail.  Therefore, now would I carry my companion across the patriarchal times at once to the era of the Deluge.  Let us speculate, as hitherto, antecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic prior state.

If, as we have seen probable, evil (a concretion always, not an abstraction) made some perceptible ravages even in the unbounded sphere of a heavenly creation, how much more rapid and overwhelming would its avalanche (once ill-commenced) be seen, when the site of its infliction was a poor band of men and women prisoned on a speck of earth.  How likely was it that, in the lapse of no long time, the whole world should have been “corrupt before God, and filled with wickedness.”  How probable, that taking into account the great duration of pristine human life, the wicked family of man should speedily have festered up into an intolerable guiltiness.  And was this dread result of the primal curse and disobedience to be regarded as the Adversary’s triumph?  Had this Accuser—­the Saxon word is Devil—­had this Slanderer of God’s attribute then really beaten Good? or was not rather all this swarming sin an awful vindication to the universe of the great need-be that God unceasingly must hold his creature up lest he fall, and that out of Him is neither strength nor wisdom?  Was Deity, either in Adam’s case or this, baffled—­nor rather justified?  Was it an experiment which had really failed; nor rather one which, by its very seeming failure, proved the point in question, the misery of creatures when separate from God?  Yea, the evil one was being beaten down beneath his very trophies in sad Tarpeian triumph:  through conquest and his children’s sins heightening his own misery.