ments of self-gratification. Health is a blessing to him who nobly works in its strength for life's elevation, a curse to him who uses it for the larger gratification of his love of sensual pleasure. Education is a blessing to him who develops by its means an enlarged capacity for usefulness, a curse to him who employs it to render himself a greater adept in crime. The great gift of life is a blessing to him who lives in true order according to the Divine intent, but a curse to him who inverts its heavenly purpose and makes it a means of mischief to the world. When, therefore, we read in the Word of God, of the Lord's blessings, we are to understand his gifts of good freely received and Righteously applied or divinely lived; but when we read of his curses, we are to understand his good gifts misapplied and wickedly perverted to evil purposes and selfish ends. It is this style of Scripture from which poetry has borrowed its character, and of which it is a fair exponent oftener than matter-of-fact prose.
Having thus enlarged upon the nature of the curse, let us take a rapid review of the spiritual meaning of that portion of the parable at which we have now arrived. The primitive church called Adam, having departed from its pristine innocence, having inclined to the selfhood or proprium, having been seduced by the serpent to eat of the tree of sense and science, trended
