Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HUMAN NATURE SINCE THE APO STACY. Whatever may have been thought of the preceding parts of our general subject, the topic upon which we now enter can never be regarded as abstract and impertinent. It may have seemed somewhat like a piece of ancient history, when we read of Eden, its innocence, its blessedness, its temptation, its blight, and its loss. It may have appeared very much like the study of a subject not only distant in point of time, but foreign and extraneous from ourselves in point of fact, when we were describing the fortunes of the first human pair. But the topic now before us, and next in order, comes home to every man's own bosom. It crowds itself, uncalled and irrepressible, upon our thoughts, on occasions of the profoundest interest; whenever a child is born into the world, and whenever a child dies out of it— when life begins, and life ends; it is vital to all systerns of education, to all questions of philanthropy, of reform, of general civilization, to all the prospects 01 humanity on the earth, and to all our personal hopes for futurity. All are profoundly interested in the question whether the consequences of the apostacy terminated on the two individuals who fell from their loyalty, or whether they involved their immediate and remote progeny. Were those who were born of our first parents, and those again who were born of them, generation after generation, as innocent and as perfect as was man when first created, or were they in some manner deteriorated, sharing in the evils consequent upon transgression? Human nature—the general character of the human race—has it been modified unhappily by the acts narrated as occurring at the very beginning ? If so, in what manner, and to what degree ? What is the truthful theory concerning human nature? No int... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.