innocence nor integrity to take care of, and that, on the contrary, he is so utterly vile, polluted, and abominable, that let him commit what crimes he will, he cannot possibly suffuse his soul with a blacker dye than that which it received from its original mould. Nay more, he has an excuse for sinning, and in that a strong inducement to it; for he will attribute his sin, (and reasonably enough,) not to his own voluntary agency, but to that vital principle of deep depravity interwoven into his moral constitution, the motions of which he has no power to controul by the exertion of opposite affections and desires.*— We might farther notice the peculiarly dreadful consequences which are likely to accrue from these notions to a person of melancholy temperament, who is thoroughly convinced that, though he wears the human form, he is in all essential properties an accurate resemblance of the spirits of darkness; and that his soul, though fair to look upon, is nothing else than a whited sepulchre, replenished within, through all its chambers, with the most foetid and loathsome corruption. We omit, however, these details, and others equally shocking, because our principal object is to shew the baneful influence of the opinions we are combating on the general interests of morality: and if it be said that this influence is not so generally visible, as a matter of fact, among the defenders of this doctrine, we answer, it is only because they do not act up to the spirit of their own theoretical principles, but suffer them to be neutralized by the admixture of other tenets of a more rațional and christian character.

We have hitherto proceeded no farther in our argument than to notice the numerous and weighty objections to the doctrine

* Extremes often meet, and they do so most effectually in the present instance; since the doctrine,, which charges human nature, as such, with the lowest degree of depravity, induces this immediate and inevitable consequence, that our nature is not only sinless, but even incapable of sinning; for where "no law is," or (which amounts to the same thing) where the law of necessity takes place, there can be no transgression."

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of man's total depravity, which strike the mind independently of, and antecedently to, the consideration of the proper arguments and authorities, by which that doctrine must finally stand or fall; in our next discourse we shall take occasion to examine the passages of Scripture which are usually alledged in its defence.

In the mean time, however, we cannot suffer to pass without farther observation one circumstance, to which we have already incidentally adverted, because it may be made to operate as a motive of no inconsiderable force, to the acquisition of personal virtue and religious principle. It is no improper course which is pursued by moralists and divines, when they dissuade men from vice, for this reason among others, that its growth and diffusion are greatly increased by every particular example of it, so that every individual sinner may become, even without intending it, the cause of misery and ruin to multitudes of his fellow-creatures besides. But how much more effectually ought; we to be deterred from sinking our mature in the scale of moral being, by the recollection that the persons most likely to be affected by our immoral conduct, are not strangers and aliens to us, in whose interests we have no other concern than that which is prompted by common humanity, but that they are those who are most intimately near to us, and in whose joys and sorrows we instinctively sympathize as we do in our own. And yet the truth of this assertion will be self-evident if it be allowed, as we suppose it will, that by the general laws of our physical economy, the mental affections and propensities of the parent are transfused into the child, so that every one, besides the degree of inordinate concupiscence, be it more or less, which he has himself inherited from Adam, may transmit to his descendants that portion also of additional and acquired corruption, which he has superinduced by his own actual sins. It is an awful reflection to think that the welfare of all future generations to the end of time, is so far dependent on the character and conduct of that which now exists; and it is a reflection too which must surely be accompanied by a

serious sense of the deep responsibility attached to the execution of a trust, which invests us with a power of influencing the hearts of those who are to succeed us, when we shall be gathered to our fathers" in "the house appointed for all living."

SERMON II.

On Original Sin.

PART II.

PREACHED on GOOD-FRIDAY, APRIL 12.

JOB 36. xxiv.

Remember that thou magnify his work.

SINCE the Christian revelation proceeded from the Author and Giver of human reason, we may naturally expect that the discoveries of the one will accurately accord with the deductions of the other. The consequences, therefore, of any assumed doctrine, which are brought to light by a fair investigation of it, will form a good presumption either of its truth or falsehood, according as they are consistent with, or contradictory to, reason; but after all it is only the law of God which must finally regulate our opinion and belief. We come therefore now to that infallible criterion for proof, if it is to be found, of the doctrine of man's total corruption.*

*No passage can furnish an adequate proof of it unless it establishes these two points-1st. That man's nature is totally corrupt. 2d. That it is so merely in consequence of the Fall. The general line of argument, therefore, which we have taken in the present discourse, is to shew that the texts commonly cited in favour of this opinion are defective either in one or both of the particulars just noticed.

An opinion so directly militating against the attributes of God, and so favourable to the cause of vice and misery, must surely, if true, be supported by clear and decisive Scripture evidence; and the first place of the Bible, in which we should naturally look for it, is that which treats of the Fall, where, however, not a word of it appears. Nor will the acknowledged brevity of the sacred historian account for the omission of a fact, which, if true, would have been incalculably the most important he could communicate to mankind: he need not indeed have expressly told us of that partial corruption, which we maintain to be the consequence of the Fall, because that would be sufficiently evident to every one, as well from his own sensations and experience, as the general representations of Scripture; but man could not, and would not have inferred that he was of a nature perfectly Satanic, without positive information to that effect.

There are indeed some passages of the book of Genesis, though not relating to the Fall, from which the advocates of this opinion have attempted to derive it. The first is, that wherein it is said that, after the Fall, "Adam begat a son in bis own likeness after his image;"+ the meaning of which words is obviously this-that he became the father of a son like himself, having the same nature which God had given him. They have been supposed, however, to signify that the image of man, in which our species is propagated, is here opposed to the image of God in which he was originally

*Such for example as the following-" there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not.”—Eccles. 7. xx. have sinned and come short of the glory of God."—Rom. 3. xxiii. "In many things we offend all."-James 3. ii. "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us."--1 John 1. viii. It is manifestly impossible to explain the universal deviation from moral rectitude, which these passages assert, without supposing that we possess some innate propensities to sin.

+ Gen. 5. iii.