6 TO LOVE AN HOLY LIFE. good, even to delight in those things which are wellpleasing to God; to which the design of Christianity was to restore men, that they might love God above all, have desires daily to be doing his will, and so find such sweet returns of blessings from him, as will be great encouragement to a furtherance and perseverance therein. Oh! happy state, indeed, of Reformation, where the curse is done away, and sin, the cause of it, put an end to, and righteousness become the girdle of our loins," when truth, and meekness, and righteousness abound in the earth. Before sin entered, all the Paradise of God was Adam's garden, and all the enjoyments there the very delight of soul and body; nothing forbid but a feeding on the mixed knowledge of the good and evil, or evil with the good: this God forbad, and therein exercised, not more the power of a Royal Sovereign, than the goodness of a merciful God, as well forewarning as forbidding sin. Yet, alas! all these enjoyments sufficed not to hold the listening mind of our first parents from proving what satan presented as a seeming benefit, which brought on their fall, and so their misery. Man, that before was God's delight, and God his chiefest joy, became below the beasts that perish; in more woeful state than they: they to have a few days here, and be no more; but he in sinful ways, and so continuing, must endure the sad and sorrowful effects thereof here; and after, woe perpetual in the world to come. Of the dismal state on earth our author gives a touch, saying, "What a shameful and unworthy thing it is for so noble and divine a creature as the soul of (1) Isaiah, xi, 5. SIN THE CAUSE OF WOE. 7 "man, to be sunk and immersed in brutish and sensual lusts, or amused with airy and phantastical delights; and so to lose the relish for solid and spiritual pleasures; that the beast should be fed and pampered, and the man and the Christian be starved in us!" 1 66 Were this alone the misery of sinful men, many perhaps would choose the present evil world, and slight the blessings of divine enjoyments wherewith the Lord rejoiceth those who fear, and love, and follow him. But such would do well to consider, that when, for their abominations here, they have lived through a state of frequent convictions, sharp reproof, strokes of horror, and foretastes of hell, they at last shall be plunged into the endless torment of it, "where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched;" and as there are degrees of sinning, so also will there be degrees of punishment. What! cannot this, O sinful man, affright thee from thy daily rebellions against a merciful God, that visits thee again and again, by the warnings of his Holy Spirit; and those who have that blessing of the Scriptures, does not the Lord, even by them, set home the dismal woe of disobedient men? How often has he, by them, told thee, the wicked, and all that forget God, shall be turned into hell," "3 from whence there is no redemption? 66 When men come to consider this their misery, what they are plunged into, and what they are fallen from; doth it not naturally lead them to bethink themselves what that must be, that is the cause of (1) Scougal. (2) Mark, ix, 44. (3) Psalm, ix, 17. 8 GOD FOREWARNED MAN OF HIS DANGER. this calamity. And what is it but sin? If sin, then, be the cause of all this misery, what is sin? Sin is a departing from the counsel of God, by breaking his just command, wherein the prerogative of God's gracious power was exerted for man's preservation, as well as to give him opportunity to approve his love and loyalty to God. It was very just, the Lord, who gave to man his being, should set bounds to the people, and appoint him some law, in observance whereof man might show his subjection to that great eternal power, which had both made him and blest him above all creatures here below, and given him power over them. That, in a proof of his love and obedience to God, man might live a season here on earth, and then be received to eternal blessedness. And, as it was just in God to reserve a supremacy over man, and to require some obedience from him, so was his mercy also largely manifest, in declaring to Adam the danger of departing from his profitable counsel and his just command. But, alas! man in this state of safety and blessedness did not long remain, but his happiness being beheld and envied by a fallen spirit, called the serpent, the devil, satan, and that adversary; he, to ruin man, and draw him from the love and favour of God, attacks him in the weakest part, the woman, and by degrees gains first a listening to, and then a liking of his temptation; so they thereby became deceived, believing, by his advice, they might obtain greater and more happy enjoyments than were allowed of God; and so tasted disobedience and instead of being as Gods, became transgressors, falling into that wherein the curse was, and so lost fellowship and NO TRUE PEACE IN SIN. 6 communion with God through the Spirit; for God is holy, and can have no fellowship with the unfruitful workers of darkness, but they are shut out from His presence who inhabits eternity and dwells in the light. CHAPTER IV. In the fall, man hath no true peace. HERE man can enjoy no true peace, but as often as he is sensible of this loss, he feels trouble, anxiety, and horror, day and night uneasiness, seeking rest but finding none; and the continuance of the inward anguish of his mind may well give him to believe there is, as before hinted, a worm that never dieth, a fire that never goes out, all procured by his own act; he, yielding to the serpent's suggestion, became himself the cause of all his misery. CHAPTER V. In the fall man's will depraved. MAN cannot justly charge his Maker, who made him happy, and in that state of happiness free to have remained; in which freedom, had his choice always been of that which was good, he had always continued happy. Which freedom, in the Account of a Spiritual 10 MAN CREATED UPRIGHT. Life, printed with the other, and recommended by the same Bishop, is thus expressed :- "There was that liberty given him which was essential to his nature, that he could fix his thoughts on any impression he chose to consider." Milton, also, in his Paradise Lost, lib. 2. treating largely hereof, I present the reader with a few of his heroic verses : "Whose fault? Whose but his own? Ingrate! he had of me And spirits, both them that stood and them who failed. Not free, what proof could they have given sincere Where only what they needs must do, appeared, Their will, disposed by absolute decree, Or high foreknowledge; they themselves decreed Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, Their freedom; they themselves ordained their fall." |