denounced against the serpent; and yet this very sense was enough to revive in them comfortable hopes of a speedy restoration. For when Adam heard that the seed of the woman was to destroy the evil spirit, he undoubtedly understood Eve to be that woman, and some issue of his by her to be that seed; and accordingly we may observe, that when Eve was delivered of Cain, the form of her exultation is, I have gotten a man from the Lord,' that is, I have gotten a man through the signal favour and mercy of God. Now this extraordinary exultation cannot be supposed to arise from the bare privilege of bearing issue, for that privilege (as she could not but know before this time) she had in common with the meanest brutes; and therefore her transport must arise from the prospect of some extraordinary advantage from this issue, and that could be no other than the destruction of her enemy.

Cain indeed proved a wicked man; but when she had conceived better expectations from Abel, and Cain had slain him, she, nevertheless, recovered her hopes upon the birth of Seth; because God, saith she, hath appointed me another seed,' or one who will destroy the power of Satan, instead of Abel, whom Cain slew. Thus we see, that the obscurity in which it pleased God to foretell the destruction of the evil spirit, gave rise to a succession of happy hopes in the breast of Adam and Eve; who (if they had known that this happiness was to be postponed for four thousand years) would, in all probability, have inevitably fallen into an extremity of despair.

But how necessary soever God might think it, to give our first parents, some general hopes and expectations of a restoration; yet, being now fallen into a state of sin and corruption, which must of course infect their latest posterity, he found it expedient to deprive them of that privilege of immortality, wherewith he had invested them, and (as an act of justice and mercy both) to turn them out of paradise, and debar them from the tree of life of justice, in that they had forfeited their right to immortality, by transgressing a command, which nothing but a vain, criminal curiosity could make them disobey; and of mercy, in that, when sin had entailed all kinds of calamity upon human nature, in such circumstances, to have perpetuated life, would have been to perpetuate misery.

This, I think, can hardly be accounted the effect of passion or peevishness: and, in like manner, God's cursing the ground, or (what is all one) his depriving it of its original fruitfulness, by a different turn given to the air, elements, and seasons, was not the effect of anger, or any hasty passion, (which God is not capable of,) but of calm and equitable justice; since it was man (who had done enough to incur the divine displeasure) that was to suffer by the curse, and not the ground itself: for the ground felt no harm by bringing forth thorns and thistles,' but Adam, who for some time had experienced the spontaneous fertility of paradise, was a sufficient sufferer by the change, when he found himself reduced to hard labour, and forced to eat his bread by

the sweat of his brows.'

It must be acknowledged therefore, that there was

1 Gen. iv. 1. "Revelation Examined, vol. 1. Gen. iv. 25. 4 Revelation Examined.

good reason, why the penalty of the first transgression should be greater than any subsequent one; because it was designed to deter posterity, and to let them see, by this example, that whatever commination God denounces against guilt will most infallibly be executed. We mistake, however, the nature of God's laws, and do in effect renounce his authority, when we suppose, that good and evil are in the nature of things only, and not in the commandments and prohibitions of God. 5 Whatever God is pleased to command or forbid, how indifferent soever it be in itself, is for that very reason, so far as it is commanded or forbidden by him, as truly good or evil, as if it were absolutely and morally so, being enacted by the same divine authority, which makes all moral precepts obligatory. God, in short, is our lawgiver, and whatever he commands, whether it be a moral precept or positive injunction, so far as he enacts it, is of the same necessary and indispensable obligation. Upon this it follows, that all sin is a transgression of the law, and a contempt of God's authority: but then the aggravations of a sin do arise from the measure of its guilt, and the parties' advantages to have avoided it; under which consideration, nothing can be more heinous than the sin of our first parents. It was not only a bare disobedience to God's command, by a perfect infidelity to his promises and threats; it was a sort of idolatry in believing the devil, and putting a greater trust in him, than in God. It was an horrible pride in them to desire to be like God, and such a diabolical pride, as made the evil angels fall from heaven. Covetousness, and a greedy theft it was, to desire and purloin, what was none of his own; and one of the most cruel and unparalleled murders that ever was committed, to kill and destroy so many thousands of their offspring. Add to this, that it was a disobedience against God, an infinite being, and of infinite dignity; a God, who had given them existence, and that so very lately, that the impresses of it could not be worn out of their memory; that had bestowed so much happiness upon them, more than on all the creation besides; that had made them lords over all, and restrained nothing from them, but only the fruit of this one tree. Add again, that they committed this sin, against the clearest conviction of conscience, with minds fully illuminated by the divine Spirit, with all possible assistance of grace to keep them from it, and no untoward bent of nature, or unruly passion to provoke them to it: and, putting all this together, it will appear, that this was a sin of the deepest dye, and that no man, now-a-days, can possibly commit a crime of such a complicated nature, and attended with such horrid aggravations.

It is the opinion of some, that the fruit of the forbidden tree might be impregnated with some fermenting juice, which put the blood and spirits into a great disorder, and thereby divested the soul of that power and dominion it had before over the body; which, by its operation, clouded the intellect, and depraved the will, and reduced every faculty of the mind to a miserable depravity, which, along with human nature, has been propagated down to posterity: as some poisons (we

Jenkins's Reasonableness, vol. 2. 6 Nicholls's Conference, vol. 1. 7 Jenkins's Reasonableness, vol. 2.

of the apostasy of angels, and of their interference and influence in the affairs of men.

The original temptation, by which they drew our first parents from their duty, and led them to transgress the only prohibition which God had imposed, is described in the first pages of Scripture; and it is repeated under much disguise, in many fables of classical mythology. Origen considers the allegorical relations furnished by Plato, with respect to Porus tempted by Penia to sin when intoxicated in the garden of Jove, as a disfigured history of the fall of man in paradise. It seems to have been blended with the story of Lot and his daughters. Plato might have acquired, in Egypt, the knowledge of the original circumstances of the fall, and have produced them, under the veil of allegory, that he might not offend the Greeks by a direct extract from the Jewish Scriptures.

The particular circumstances also of the leader of the evil spirits having envied man's happiness, and by disguising himself under the form of a serpent, occasioned his ejection from paradise, was figured out in other accounts. The worship established towards the evil spirit by his contrivance, sometimes under the very appearance in which he seduced mankind, is to be found among the Phoenicians and Egyptians.

CHAP. IV.-Of Original Sin.

ORIGINAL Sin indeed is a phrase which does not occur in the whole compass of the Bible; but the nature of the thing itself, and in what manner it came to be committed, are sufficiently related: so that those who admit of the authority of the Scriptures, make no question of the fact. The great matter in dispute is, what the effect of this transgression was; what guilt it contained; what punishment it merited; and in what degree its guilt and punishment both may be said to affect us.

Some have not stuck to affirm, that in the beginning of the world, there was no such thing as any express covenant between God and man; that the prohibition of the tree of knowledge was given to our first parents only, and they alone consequently were culpable by its transgression; that Adam, in short, was mortal, like one of us; he was no representative for his posterity; his sin purely personal; and that the imputation of guilt, down to this time, for an offence so many thousand years ago committed, is a sad reflection upon the goodness and justice of God.

In opposition to this, others think proper to affirm, that at the first creation of things, there was a covenant

The tutelar deity of particular districts was sometimes introduced in the same manner; thus a serpent is represented by Virgil to have appeared to Æneas.

The first worship of Apollo was offered to him under the representation of a serpent; but Apollo was generally regarded as the deity who had killed the serpent Python, which word was probably derived from the Hebrew word which signifies a serpent. The account of Discord being cast out from heaven, referred to by Agamemnon, in the nineteenth book of Homer's Iliad, has been thought to be a corrupt tradition of the fall of the evil angels.

The original perfection of man, the corruption of human nature resulting from the fall, and the increasing depravity which proceeded with augmented violence from generation to generation, are to be found in various parts of profane literature. Euryalus, the Pythagorean, declared that man was made in the image of God. The loss of that resemblance was supposed to have resulted from the effects of disobedience, and was considered as so universal that it was generally admitted, as is expressed by Horace, that no man was born without vices. The conviction of a gradual deterioration from age to age, of a change from a golden period, by successive transitions to an iron depravity, of a lapse from a state devoid of guilt and fear, to times filled with iniquity, was universally entertained.'

'Gray's Connexion, pp. 135-140.

and proxy, who stipulated for them all; that by a transgression of this covenant, our first parents fell from their original righteousness, and thence became dead in sin, and actually defiled in all their faculties of soul and body; and that this corruption is not only the parent of all actual transgressions, but (even in its own nature) brings guilt upon every one that is born into the world, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God, and the curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all the miseries that attend it, spiritual, temporal, and eternal.

6

There is another opinion which concerns itself not with the imputation of the guilt, but only with the punishment of this transgression, and thereupon supposes, that though Adam, as to the composition of his body, was naturally mortal, yet, by the supernatural gift of God, (whereof the tree of life was a symbol or sacrament,) he was to be preserved immortal: from whence it is inferred, That the denunciation of the sentence, In the day thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die,' is to be understood literally indeed, but then extended no farther than natural death; which, considering the fears, and terrors, and sundry kinds of misery which it occasions, may be reputed punishment severe enough, though fairly consistent with our notions of God's goodness and justice, because it is but a temporal punishment, and abundantly recompensed by that eternal redemption which all mankind shall have in Christ Jesus.

Others again do so far approve of this, as to think it in part the punishment of original sin; but then they suppose, that besides this natural mortality, there is a certain weakness and corruption spread through the whole race of mankind, which discovers itself in their inclination to evil, and insufficiency to what is good.

* Burnet on the Articles; and Taylor's Polemical Discourses. Locke's Reasonableness of Christianity; and A Treatise on the Divine Imputation of Original Sin, by D. Whitby,

This, say they, the very heathens complain of; this the Scriptures every where testify; and therefore they conclude that since man was not originally made in this condition, (for God created him after his own image,) be must have contracted all this from his fall; and that therefore the threatening of death had an higher signification than the dissolution of the soul and body, namely, the loss of the divine favour, of all supernatural gifts and graces, and a total defection of the mind from God, which immediately ensued upon the transgression.

These are some of the principal opinions, (for the little singularities are innumerable,) and, in the midst of so many intricacies, to find out a proper path for us to pursue, we may resolve the whole controversy into this one question:-" Whether human nature be so far corrupted, and the guilt of our first parents' transgression so far imputed to their posterity, that every person, from the mother's womb, must necessarily go astray, and must certainly fall into everlasting perdition, without the means appointed in the new covenant for his preservation ?" And in searching into this, the sentiments of the fathers, much more the alterations of the schoolmen, will help us very little. The former are so divided in

a St Austin, in his fourth book against Julian, brings in Cicero, on Repub. b. 3., complaining “That nature, in bringing forth man to existence, had behaved like a stepmother, and not a mother, he possessing a body naked, weak, and soon subject to decay; with a mind, harassed by troubles, crushed by fears, and sinking under oppressions; in which, however, there exists a latent divine flame of intellect." Whereupon the holy father makes this remark, "That author saw the effect, but was ignorant of the cause, for he knew not there was a heavy yoke laid on the sons of Adam; he was not enlightened with the light of revelation, and consequently original transgression was to him a thing totally unknown."

The Scriptures state the corruption of human nature in such terms as these, namely, that by one man sin entered into the world' by whose disobedience many were made sinners,' Rom. x. 19., that by nature' therefore we are the children of wrath,' Eph. ii. 3., and unable to receive the things of the Spirit, or to know them because they are spiritually discerned,' 1 Cor. ii. 14., for what is born of flesh, is flesh,' John iii. 6.; and who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean?' Job xiv. 4. The royal Psalmist therefore makes, in his own person, this confession of our natural depravity; 'Behold I was shapen in wickedness, and in sin did my mother conceive me,' Ps. li. 5., and St Paul makes this public declaration of our inability to do good; I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me, but to perform that which is good, I find not; for though I delight in the law of God after the inward man, yet I see another law in my members, warring against the law in my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?' Rom. vii. 18., &c. e Vossius, in his history of Pelagianism, assures us, that the whole Catholic church was always of opinion, that the guilt of Adam's sin was imputed to his posterity to their condemnation; so that children dying therein were consigned to everlasting punishment, at least to an everlasting separation from God: and, to confirm this assertion, he quotes a multitude of passages out of almost all the doctors of the Greek church. Taylor and Whitby, and some other writers upon this argument, produce the testimony of the same fathers to evince the very contrary position; so that there is no depending upon any thing where authors are so inconsistent with themselves, and so repugnant to one another. The truth is, before Pelagius appeared in the world, most of the ancient writers of the church were very inaccurate, both in what they thought and wrote concerning original sin and free-will; and it seems as if the providence of God permitted that heretic to arise, that thereby he might engage the maintainers of orthodoxy to study those points more maturely. Whitaker on Original Sin, b. 2.

their opinions, and the latter so abstruse in their arguments upon this subject, that an honest inquirer will find himself bewildered, rather than instructed; and therefore our safest recourse will be to the declarations of God's will, explained in a manner comporting with his attributes.

That God, who is the fountain of our being, is infinitely pure and holy, and can therefore be neither the author nor promoter of any sin in us, is obvious to our first conceptions of him; and therefore, if the corruption of our nature be supposed to be such as necessarily and unavoidably determines us to wickedness, without the least tendency to good, to give it a counterpoise, those who maintain the negative of the question, are in the right so far as they stand in defence of God's immaculate purity, and are known to be asserters of the freedom of human choice, without which the common distinctions of virtue and vice, and the certain prospects of rewards and punishments, are entirely lost. But when they carry the point so far as to deny any alteration in human nature now, from what it was at its first creation; as to deny, that Adam, in his state of uprightness, had any gifts and graces supernatural, any clearness in his understanding, any strength in his will, any regularity in his affections, more than every man of maturity and competent faculties has at this day; when they adventure to affirm, that there is no necessity of grace in our present condition, to assist our hereditary weakness, to enlighten our minds, and incline our wills, and conduct our affections to the purposes of holiness, but that every man may do what is good and acceptable to God by the power of his own natural abilities, they then run counter to the common experience of human infirmity; they overlook the declarations of God's word concerning his gracious assistance; and seem to despise the kind overture of that blessed agent, whereby we are 'renewed and sanctified in the spirit of our minds.'

In like manner, when the maintainers of absolute depravation contend, that man, in his present condition, is far departed from original righteousness, and, of his own accord, very much inclined to evil; that the order of his faculties is destroyed, and those graces which constituted the image of God, departed from him; that in this state he is now unable to raise himself from the level of common impotence, but requires the intervention of some superior principle to aid and assist him in his progress towards heaven; they say no more than what experience teaches us, and what the sacred records, which acquaint us with the dispensation of grace, are known to authorize. But when they carry their positions to a greater extent than they will justly bear; when they affirm, that ever since the first defection, the mind of man is not only much impaired, but grievously vitiated in all its faculties, having a strong aversion to every thing that is good, and an invincible propensity to what is evil; not one thought, word, or wish, that tends towards God, but the seeds and principles of every vice that bears the image and lineaments of the devil, inherent in it: when they advance such doctrines as these, I say, they debase human nature too low, and seem to impute such iniquity to its Maker as can hardly be wiped off, if every human soul be naturally inclined to all kind of wickedness when it comes from the hand of his creating power.