The Adamus exul of Grotius; or The Prototype of Paradise Lost — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

ADAMUS EXUL. PROLEGOMENA BY THE TRANSLATOR. THE great design of the Deity in creating by his eternal Word the spiritual orders of being, involving the work of the divine Redeemer in saving and restoring them when fallen into transgression, forms the leading theme of Scripture. In connection with this, the aboriginal glory of Man in Paradise ending in his expulsion from the Garden of Iden, as explained by the inspired writers, is a topic of universal interest. This first scene in the grand drama of human destinies—this sole key to the enigmas of mortal experience—this tremendous lapse of mind and nature which has thrown so deep a colouring over all subsequent his- tories, has necessarily excited the most intense and scrutinising attention. The brief yet forcible description of the sacred writers has been very differently expounded by theological investigators. Origen and some of the primitive evangelical fathers, agreeing with the Cabalistic and Gnostic dogmas, supposed this description to refer to a purely spiritual, angelic, and transcendental form of human existence, associated with the divine Word in an ethereal Paradise amang the unfallen stars. Others, like Augustine, More, Brocklesby, and the symbolic Platonists, supposed it to allude to a fall of Angels, and the lapse of souls with their social stars, each retaining its proper paradise in lower and separate economies; while others, abiding by the literal account, have imagined that nothing superterrestrial, mystical, or figurative was at all intended. These several expositors have likewise entertained different notions with regard to the original sin; some, like Berrow, regarding it as the original and general lapse of souls, some, like Cudworth and Ramsay, esteeming it the lapse of our particular species into a state of materialism ; and others more pru- dently conceiving it to be the offence of disobeying the divine command with regard to the forbidden fruit. Among the expositors who have supposed that the Mosaic account should be construed literally, a great question has been mooted with respect to the geographical position of the terrestrial Paradise and the Garden of Eden. ‘The true theory appears to have been nearly attained. by Father Calmet, the Benedictine, in his commentary on the.text in which the river which gave birth to the Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel and Pherath B COMIC HOO (CO