not give an imperfect law, or a law that requires but an imperfect obedience to it. His title as the Creator and the God of nature, demands the best service that our natural powers can perform: Our understanding and will, our heart, and hand, and tongue, owe him their utmost obedience. Besides if the law did not continue to require our best and highest obedience, we should not be guilty of sin where we fall short of perfection; that is, if we loved God in part, if we serve him in part, though it was not with all our mind, with all our soul, with all our heart, and with all our strength, yet we should not be transgressors; but this I think is a very absurd supposition. I answer in the second place,

II. That the moral law may continue still to demand perfect obedience of all men, though since the fall they cannot perfectly fulfil it; for the grace of the gospel which is revealed in scripture and which runs through every dispensation since the fall of Adam,, has not abated the demands of the law, though it has provided a relief for us under our failings. And though we do not fulfil what God requires in this law, yet he condescends in this gospel to pardon and to accept the humble, the sincere, the penitent sinner, on the account of the perfect obedience and atouing sacrifice of his own Son. It is granted indeed that all men who have been saved in the way of the gospel have yielded but a very imperfect and defective obedience to this law, yet still the law of God demands a perfection of holiness according to our utmost natural powers and capacities; the law demands that we sin not at all; but the gospel says, If we sin we have an Advocate with the Father, even Jesus Christ the righteous, who is a propitiation for the sins of the world; 1 John ii. 2*,

* There is also another objection against this doctrine which some raise from the words of scripture. Does not the apostle tell Timothy that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners? &c. 1 Tim. i. 9. But this is readily answered by considering what is the apostle's meaning here. It is only to shew that disobedient and ungodly men have need of particular and express laws or precepts, with threatenings and terrors annexed to them, in order to restrain them from iniquity; but the righteous man bath a sanctified nature, and an inward aversion within himself to all evil practices; and therefore though his conscience acknowledge him to be under the commands of this law, yet he does not so much need the express and public proclamation of it in order to secure him in the practice of duty.

It has been objected again that St. Paul confirms the christians and encourages them to boliness by telling them they are become dead to the law, and they are delivered from the law, that being dead, wherein they were held; Rom. vii. 4-6. To this I answer that the apostle allows that christians are delivered also from the law as to its cursing and condemning power by their pardon and justification in Christ Jesus; they are delivered also from the unhappy effect which the law may sometimes have upon the hearts of sinners to irritate awaken and provoke sin in them by lusting for things forhidden; but he does not allow even himself or the best of christians to be delivered or released from the commands of the law; for in this very place be is persuading christians to holiness or obedience to the precepts of

Having proved the perpetual obligation of the moral law, I proceed to the third part of my discourse, and that is briefly to represent the evil nature of sin. Our text informs us wherein it consists. Sin is the transgression of the law. When a creature transgresses any command that God hath given, he commits sin; but this chiefly refers to the moral law, because it is this law upon which all others are founded, and which gives force and authority to them all. Now there is a heinous evil contained in the nature of sin, if we consider the following characters of it.

I. "It is an affront to the authority and government of a wise and holy God, a God who has sovereign right to make laws for his creatures, and has formed all his commands and prohibitions according to infinite wisdom. Every act of wilful sin does as it were deny the sovereignty of God over us and the property that God has in us according to the expression of profane sinners; Ps. xii. 4. Our lips are our own, who is Lord over us. Wilful sin against God renounces his right to govern us and pours high contempt upon his wisdom and his righteous dominion; it denies his laws to be wise and righteous, as though they were not fit to be enjoined of God or practised of

men.

II. "Sin carries in the nature of it high ingratitude to God our Creator, and a wicked abuse of that goodness which has bestowed upon us all our natural powers and talents, our limbs, our senses, and all our faculties of soul and body." Such a Creator, who has furnished his creatures with so many excellent faculties, may reasonably expect and demand of them a return of love and obedience, but to employ these very talents and powers for the dishonour of him who gave them is abominable in itself and highly provoking to that God who formed us.

III. Sin against the law of God "breaks in upon that wise and beautiful order which God has appointed to run through his whole creation." Prov. xvi. 4. God has made all things for himself and his own glory; but if we set up ourselves and our

the law; and in 1 Cor. ix. 21. he declares he is not without law to God, but he is under the law, as it is in the hands of Christ. Not an apostle nor an angel from heaven can release creatures from the demands of duty to their Creator, for while we are the work of the hand of God, and continue to be his creatures, this law never ceases to command perfect obedience to the God that made us, viz. that we must love him with all our soul, and with all our strength.

Nor do all the lessening expressions which the apostle uses in his epistle to the Hebrews against the law, give us a release from the moral law, for his design is only to shew the weakness and unprofitableness of the Jewish law or covenant of Sinai in comparison of the glorious state of the gospel, and the new covenant, when the moral law shall be written on the hearts of men. Heb. vii. 8. and viii, 10-13. This is the law that must stand for ever when the Jewish covenant vaishes and is abolished.

own honour as the chief end of all, and neglect to pay our duty and honours to the blessed God, we run counter to this divine appointment, and place ourselves in the room of God. He has ordained that his creatures should be mutually helpful to each other, and that man should love his neighbour: but if malice and envy and falsehood prevail in us, and if cruelty and injustice be practised toward our fellow-creatures, the proper and beautiful harmony between the intelligent creatures is broken, and it is a hateful thing in the eyes of God to see those rules of order violated, renounced and trampled upon, which he has establised with so much wisdom and justice. Yet further God has ordained reason in man to govern his appetites and passions and all his inferior powers: But sin brings shameful confusion into our very frame, while it exalts the appetites and passions to reign over our reason, to break the rules and dictates of conscience, and transgress all the bounds of reasonable restraint. Sin working in the heart gives a loose to those licentious and unruly powers of nature, and spreads wild disorder through

all the life.

IV. As it is the very nature of sin to bring disorder into the ereation of God, so its natural consequences are pernicious to the sinful creature! Every act of wilful sin tends to deface the moral image of God in the soul, and ruin the best part of his workmanship. It warps the mind aside from its chief good, and turns the heart away from God and all that is holy. Sin forms itself in the heart into an evil principle and habit of disobedience; one sin makes way for another, and increases the wretched trade of sinning. A frequent breaking the restraints of law and conscience, not only strengthens the inclination to vice, but it enfeebles the voice and power of conscience to withhold us from sin; it sets man a running in the paths of intemperance and malice, folly and madness down to perdition and misery: It many times brings painful diseases upon the body, and it is the spring of dreadful sorrows in the soul: All these are the natural consequences of sin.

V. In the last place I add, "sin provokes God to anger as he is the righteous Governor of the world; it brings guilt upon the creature, and exposes it to the punishments threatened by the broken law. When sin eutered into the nature of man there was an end of all the friendly converse between him and his Maker. Man is afraid of God and God is angry with man. Sin throws him out of his Maker's former favour, and exposes him to the wrath and indignation of a righteous and almighty God who will vindicate the honours of his own law. He is a God of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and he is angry with the wicked every day; P. vii. 11. The great Creator and Governor of the universe

worms as we are.

will not always bear to be affronted by such contemptible little If we turn not from our evil ways he will whet his sword, he has bent his bow and made it ready, he hath prepared for him the instruments of death, and the soul of the sinner shall feel his arrows. Verses 12, 13.

And yet further as God has set up conscience in the bosom of man to be a witness for God there, and to put man in mind of his Maker's law and his own duty, so his power called conscience is also ordained to be a judge in the heart of man in the room of God, and to sentence and condemn the guilty creature, and to begin the execution of this sentence with sharp anguish of heart, with inward reproaches and bitter terrors. This home-bred torment is a hell upon earth, and it often begins before the sinner dies.

Who sees not the dreadful evil of sin, in the wretched change that is introduced by it into the creation of God in the upper and lower worlds? It has turned angels of light into devils and spirits of darkness: It has thrown millions of glorious and unhappy beings out of their heavenly habitation: It made our first parents afraid of their Maker even in paradise, and turned them out of that happy garden. It brought many curses upon human nature, many sorrows and sufferings of every kind. It is sin that has run through every generation, and exposed us to all the evils that we feel, and to all that we fear, either from the hand of God, or our fellow-creatures. While man stood innocent and obedient, nothing could hurt him; but he broke the law of his God, and renounced his government, and the bonds of love between mankind are broken, and the brute creatures have broken their subjection to man in a great degree. He who was made to govern them is afraid of them, and has often been destroyed by them: Innocence had been a sure and everlasting defence. All the desolations that have been made by famine and pestilence and wars and earthquakes, and by the rage of wild-beasts from the beginning of the world, are owing to the sin of man.

But these thoughts bring me down to the fourth general head of my discourse, which is to consider the proper demerit of sin, or what is the punishment it deserves. This I shall represent under these four plain Propositions :--

Proposition I.-When God made man at first, he designed to continue him in life and happiness so long as man continued innocent and obedient to the law, and thereby maintained his allegiance to God his Maker." This is agreeable to the terms of the law represented in Rom. ii. 7. If he had patiently continued in well-doing, he should have enjoyed glory and honour, immortality and eternal life: And the blessed God seems to have pro

mised it to man, at least by way of emblem and sacrament, in giving him the tree of life, and perhaps also by a more express promise of life, which through the designed brevity of the history, Moses might not mention.

II." By a wilful and presumptuous transgression of the law, man violated his allegiance to God his Maker, and forfeited all good things that his Creator had given him, and the hope of all that he had promised. Every sin incurs a forfeiture of life itself, and all the present and future comforts of it, according to the express words of the threatening; Gen. ii. 17. In the day that thou eatest of the forbidden fruit thou shalt surely die, that is, thou shalt become mortal and liable to death*. And the apostle tells us; Rom. vi. 23. The wages of sin is death. Nor is such a forfeiture of life and the blessings of it by sin, utterly unknown to the heathen world, as St. Paul declares; Rom. i. 32. Who knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death: And I think the very light of nature might find out this; for it would be strange indeed if God the Creator should be bound to continue life or any blessing to a creature which had broken his allegiance to his Maker, and by a wilful and presumptuous offence, had as it were renounced the very end and design for which he was made.

III. "This forfeiture of life and the blessings of it by sin, is an everlasting forfeiture." Every sin is usually and justly supposed to increase its demerit or desert of punishment, according to the dignity of the person whose law is broken. Sin against a father or a prince carries greater guilt in it, than that which is committed against a neighbour or a servant: And in this way of argument, sin against God appears to have a sort of infinite evil in it, because it is committed against the infinite Majesty of heaven And on this account every sin deserves a sort of infinite or everlasting punishment, that is, an everlasting loss of life and all the blessings of it, which are eternally forfeited thereby. And perhaps this is the lowest punishment that ever is inflicted

* Death in its original, and most proper and natural sense, signifies the loss of life, and together with it the loss of all its blessings and comforts. This is the common if not the universal sense of the word in the writings of Moses: And in the sanction of a law it is reasonable to suppose the word is used in its most natural and proper sense. Death in scripture is used sometimes for the loss of privileges, blessings and comforts, even where life remains: In this sense it signifies the soul's loss of the image of God, of holiness and peace: This is called spiritual death. Thus the Ephesians are said to be dead in trespasses and sins; Eph. ii. 1. Sometimes death signifies the loss of blessings in the world to come, together with positive sorrows and sufferings both in soul and body for ever. So in Rom. viii. 13. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; And John vi. 50. This is the bread which came down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die. In Rev. xxi. 8. this is called the second death. Now death in all these senses is either the natural consequent of sin, or it is the legal punishment of it, according to its several aggravations, as will appear afterwards.