innocent state. The history of the past—so far back as human chronicles extend—is little more than a record of crime; and the struggles of the present are but efforts to rise from the moral mire into which the world is plunged. So there has been a great change. Celestial innocence has given place to selfishness and sensuality. This decadence occurred in prehistoric times. No earthly chronicler has left us the record of its progress. It could not have been sudden. Great and rapid moral changes are contrary to all experience. Nations decay by successive steps which run through centuries. Egypt, Athens, Sparta, Rome, sunk to effeminacy, indolence, crime and final destruction, by gradual departures, each so small that it was difficult to mark its separate existence; and their decline was so slow as to make their complete decadence the work of a hundred or a thousand years.
So was it, probably, that the most ancient people fell. So we read the allegory as set forth in the second and third chapters of Genesis. There was a first step, a second, and—a thousandth. There were also general steps measured by marked peculiarities of retrogression. It was the departure from rectitude of a race, and not that of an individual. That Church of innocence and peace may have lasted many centuries; how many we cannot tell. From that blissful state to its declen-
