the heavenly city shall be fairer. The Paradise regained is an
advance on the Paradise that was lost. These are the two ends of the
history of man, separated by who knows how many millenniums. Heaven
lay about him in his infancy, but as he journeyed westwards its
morning blush faded into the light of common day--and only at
eventide shall the sky glow again with glory and colour, and the
western heaven at last outshine the eastern, with a light that shall
never die. A fall, and a rise--a rise that reverses the fall, a rise
that transcends the glory from which he fell,--that is the Bible's
notion of the history of the world, and I, for my part, believe it
to be true, and feel it to be the one satisfactory explanation of
what I see round about me and am conscious of within me.

1. _Man had an Eden and lost it._

I take the Fall to be a historical fact. To all who accept the
authority of Scripture, no words are needed beyond the simple
statement before us, but we may just gather up the signs that there
are on the wide field of the world's history, and in the narrower
experience of individuals, that such a fall has been.

Look at the condition of the world: its degradation, its savagery-all
its pining myriads, all its untold millions who sit in darkness
and the shadow of death. Will any man try to bring before him the
actual state of the heathen world, and, retaining his belief in a
God, profess that these men are what God meant men to be? It seems
to me that the present condition of the world is not congruous with
the idea that men are in their primitive state, and if this is what
God meant men for, then I see not how the dark clouds which rest on
His wisdom and His love are to be lifted off.