THE REASONABLENESS OF CHRISTIANITY. THE little satisfaction and consistency that is to be found in most of the systems of divinity I have met with, made me betake myself to the sole reading of the Scripture (to which they all appeal) for the understanding the Christian religion. What from thence, by an attentive and unbiassed search I have received, reader, I here deliver to thee. If by this my labour thou receivest any light or confirmation in the truth, join with me in thanks to the Father of Lights, for his condescension to our understandings. If, upon a fair and unprejudiced examination, thou findest I have mistaken the sense and tenor of the gospel, I beseech thee, as a true Christian, in the spirit of the gospel (which is that of charity) and in the words of sobriety, set me right in the doctrine of salvation. 1. It is obvious to any one who reads the New Testament, that the doctrine of redemption, and consequently of the gospel, is founded upon the supposition of Adam's fall. To understand, therefore, what we are restored to by Jesus Christ, we must consider what the Scripture shows we lost by Adam. This I thought worthy of a diligent and unbiassed search; since I found the two extremes that men run into on this point, either on the one hand shook the foundations of all religion, or on the other made Christianity almost nothing. For whilst some men would have all Adam's posterity doomed to eternal infinite punishment, for the transgression of Adam, whom millions had never heard of, and no one had authorized to transact for him, or be his representative; this seemed to others so little consistent with the justice or goodness of the great and infinite God, that they thought there was no redemption necessary, and consequently that there was none, rather than admit of it upon a supposition so derogatory to the honour and attributes of that Infinite Being; and so made Jesus Christ nothing but the restorer and preacher of pure natural religion; thereby doing violence to the whole tenor of the New Testament: and, indeed, both sides will be suspected to have trespassed this way, against the written word of God, by any one who does but take it to be a collection of writings designed by God for the instruction of the illiterate bulk of mankind in the way to salvation; and therefore generally and in necessary points to be understood in the plain direct meaning of the words and phrases, such as they may be supposed to have had in the mouths of the speakers, who used them according to the language of that time and country wherein they lived, without such learned, artificial, and forced senses of them as are sought out, and put upon them in most of the systems of divinity, according to the notions that each one has been bred up in. 2. To one that thus unbiassed reads the Scriptures, what Adam fell from, is visible, was the state of perfect obedience, which is called justice in the New Testament, though the word which in the original signifies justice, be translated righteousness: and by this fall he lost paradise, wherein was tranquillity and the tree of life; that is, he lost bliss and immortality. The penalty annexed to the breach of the law, with the sentence pronounced by God upon it, shows this. The penalty stands thus: In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.' How was this executed? He did eat; but in the day he did eat, he did not actually die, but was turned out of paradise from the tree of life, and shut out for ever from it, lest he should take thereof and live for ever. This shows that the state of paradise was a state of immortality, of life without end, which he lost that very day that he eat.' His life began from thence 1 The question here discussed is one upon which the varieties of opinion are almost as numerous as the persons who have treated of it. Milton, whose theoretical notions underwent, in the course of his life, numerous alterations, always tending from the more fanatical to the less, evidently, when he wrote the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, knew not what to think of the state into which Adam fell by his transgression; but, like the erring spirits, "Reasoned high Of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute, "The Jesuits," he says, "and that sect among us which is named of Arminius, are wont to accuse us," (he was now a Presbyterian,) "of making God the author of sin, in two degrees especially, not to speak of his permission: first, because we hold, that he hath decreed some to damnation, and conse to shorten and waste, and to have an end; and from thence to his actual death, was but like the time of a prisoner between the sentence passed and the execution, which was in view and certain; death then entered and showed his face, which before was shut out and not known. So St. Paul, By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin;'' that is a state of death and mortality: and, 'in Adam all die; that is, by reason of his transgression all men are mortal, and come to die. 3. This is so clear in these cited places, and so much the current of the New Testament, that no quently to sin, say they; next, because those means, which are of saving knowledge to others, he makes to them an occasion of greater sin. Yet, considering the perfection wherein man was created, and might have stood, no decree necessitating his freewill, but subsequent, though not in time, yet in order to causes which were in his own power; they might, methinks, be persuaded to absolve both God and us. Whenas the doctrine of Plato and Chrysippus, with their followers, the Academics and the Stoics, knew not what a consummate and most adorned Pandora was bestowed upon Adam to be the nurse and guide of his arbitrary happiness and perseverance; I mean his native innocence and perfection, which might have kept him from being our true Epimetheus; and though they taught of virtue and vice to be both the gift of divine destiny, they could yet give reasons not invalid, to justify the councils of God and fate from the insulsity of mortal tongues: that man's own free-will, self-corrupted, is the adequate and sufficient cause of his disobedience besides fate; as Homer also wanted not to express, both in his Iliad and Odyssey. And Manilius the poet, although in his fourth book he tells of some created both to sin and punishment;' yet without murmuring, and with an industrious cheerfulness, he acquits the Deity." Book i. ch. 3. And so Manilius might well do, because the pagan notions of deity and fate were most obscure and confused; for, to those best acquainted with ancient philosophy, it will, I doubt not, appear, that what they called fate, we call God, their revealed separate divinities being only the high ministers of this sovereign power of the universe.-ED. Rom. v. 12. 21 Cor. xv. 22. |