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as a curse or a blessing. Certain we are that no man yet has complained to us that death has hurt him.—We can readily conceive that man, after he had discovered the comparative extent of his intelligence, would have concluded that the directest mode of increasing it was by death: he would have embraced death with rapture. Then why does the fable place the tree of life (which can mean only death) behind a terror which "turns every way," and frightens man from its approach? We have our reason: it is because no advance can satisfy man's curiosity; and there are excellent reasons why man should stay on the earth for a time. The terror of death is of benefit to him. But it is not clear in the fable whether this terror was a blessing or a curse. And we say of all these fables together, they are misty and oracular, and little to our purpose. Had their authors been competent to the subject, we had not needed now to have questioned their intention.—We speak of the fables as we find them, believing that time has altered them. We love to think that far in the forgotten past some lone and lofty genius saw the reason of the cursing of the ground, and saw with a prophet's vision those windings of the human race which should make that reason the common property of mankind.

Here, then, we indicate the primal necessity of evil in the world. The harmony or perfection of the universe requiring the guidance of a single will and perfect intelligence, all other intellectual beings must necessarily be fractional and subservient, and incapable of intellectual perfection: and by so much as