8. Our nature has originally a bias to moral good in preference to moral evil, and when the choice is offered to the will, reason, when it is not darkened, and conscience, when it is not depraved, will prefer virtue before vice with as little hesitation, as we prefer sweet to bitter, pleasure to pain, and happiness to misery. God originally made man upright, and some traces of that uprightness yet remain, amidst all the ruins of his fall. Whatever be the measure of his depravity, it is not total. But, like a stately edifice in ruins, he retains the broken fragments of former magnificence and splendor. In this mixed state, good and evil are promiscuously blended in the same characters; and if on the one hand, we find no perfection of virtue, so on the other, we find no total corruption; but in the same character, a singular compound of virtue and vice, of dignity and meanness; just as in the material world we observe light and darkness, order and confusion, stupendous mountains, and extensive plains blended together. And it is the remains of this natural rectitude, which, amidst all men's forgetfulness of God, and neglect of the great salvation of the gospel, which amidst the noise of dissipation, and

pleasures of sin, still points out, that there is a right and a wrong; which at intervals awakens up the dormant conscience within, and secretly approves the right, which it neglects, and condemns the wrong, which it pursues.

9. If God give to some a power to be righteous, which he withholds from others, it must be a gift granted either with or without any endeavour to obtain it. If it be an unconditional grant, then as some are made righteous by divine appointment, others are made sinners by divine appointment. i. e. Whether they be made sinners or saints, it is not a thing which they could control;....which at once confounds and destroys all distinctions of good and evil. Now as God is a being of justice and goodness, how are either of these attributes here displayed? That this good Being has constituted all the generations of men sinners, appointed them to eternal wrath before they were born, and that of all those who come into the world, only a very small portion is elected to salvation, whilst millions and millions are created for no other purpose than to be tormented for ever hereafter !

10. Though it may be difficult to determine what is the precise nature of justice, as it respects the government of God, yet we may conclude it will not essentially differ from that, which he has commanded us to exercise in our conduct towards each other. A contrary supposition would be to make him act contrary to his own laws and his own decrees. According to our sense of right and wrong, which is his gift, and according to the spirit and letter of his laws, it would be unjust to punish a man for crimes he never committed, or to hang him for a robbery, which was perpetrated by one of his remote progenitors, and in the guilt of which his descendants could not possibly be involved. If it would be unjust in man, why should we ascribe such a conduct to God?

11. There seems to be no truth in revelation more clear than this, that God prefers the righteous to the sinner, that those who keep his laws are the objects of his regard, and those who violate them, of his displeasure. But if all men by nature are totally, inherently and radically vicious, completely indisposed to good, and wholly inclined to evil, they would all be, in respect to moral qualities, on the same level, and one

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could have no better claim to preference than another. Whence then do the scriptures assure us that God does prefer some to others, the just to the unjust; for if all men be thus totally corrupt by nature, God prefers one individual before another, without a cause for preference. But moral qualities can alone form a ground of preference in the sight of a moral goverOtherwise we make religion a system of mystery, in which all distinctions between right and wrong are destroyed, in which reason is dethroned, and imagination triumphant.

nor.

PART III.

THE FALL OF ADAM, &c. EXAMINED.

1. THAT the fall of Adam destroyed the capacity of his offspring to do good, and left nothing in man but a capacity to do evil; that it extinguished the life of religion in the soul, that it estranged all his affections from the law of God, and impressed on his disposition and habits an irresistible bias to all manner of iniquity, are opinions, which it may not be amiss for us carefully to investigate.

2. That the fall of Adam did not destroy the capacity of his offspring either to do good or evil, may be proved from the plain and incontrovertible authority of scripture. In Gen. iv. 7. the Lord is represented as saying to Cain, whose jealousy was provoked by the distinguishing marks of the divine favour which Abel had received: If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? If thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.