Now, this tree being so called the tree of knowledge of good and evil, was but to signify that there was good and evil beyond what they knew of in that estate, which they could not come at without sin, and this good was unknown to them, but the evil was, thou shalt die. (See noted, p. 18.)

Now Adam breaks the law, and so ventures the evil, to come to the knowledge of that unknown good. We see it appears plainly that the whole law was contained in that covenant to

Adam ;

has to do with the salvation of a guilty sinner :-and there is a sense in which it has nothing to do with it; the sense in which it hath to do with it, is as it stood connected with Christ; he was constituted a sin-offering, and stood inseperably connected with this law; he was born of a woman made under the law, that he might redeem them that were under the law, and that they who were legally and justly condemned, might receive the adoption of sons, Gal. iv. 5. He was under a covenant engagement to obey it, and to die under its curse. Exclusive of the above law, the Saviour was born as an Israelite, under the ceremonial law, and a law entirely distinct from both, which may be properly called a mediatorial law. This mediatorial law to which Christ submitted, imposed obedience to the institutes of a dispensation, that properly speaking, could not be called

Adam; and his eating was the breach of the whole law, so that the obedience of the whole law was contained in obeying this, Thou shalt not eat of it. But since the fall, the curse is removed about the tree of life, turning every way, about which all the vessels of wrath are catching at to this day, and will be, what judgment soever they pretend.-Now for the former, as has been said before, his obedience alone was required.

First.

a dispensation of the law nor the gospel, more glorious than the former, obscurity itself compared with the latter, being divinely instituted, it may be properly called, a short but an energetic interregnum, or an intermediate space between the abrogation of the Levitical priesthood and the establishment of Him who was made a priest for ever, after the order of Melchizedeck. This mediatorial law imposed upon Christ the necessity of compliance with all the institutions of every dispensation: as an Israelite he was circumcised the eighth day, &c.-Under the authority of this law, he complied with the baptism of John in the wilderness; when John, under a deep and an humiliating sense of his unworthiness objected, (being in his best estate only a reed shaken with the wind,) his difficulties are removed, and his objections obviated, when he is

First. It appears because he was turned out of the garden, there was none begotten in that Paradise, all his posterity is turned out in him.

Secondly. If the obedience to that law had been required, Thou shalt not eat of it, I question whether one of his sons knew where or what that tree was.

Thirdly. Because the tree of life was fenced about with a flaming sword, turning every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Now, if
Adam's

informed that it is necessary it should be so now, that all righteousness might be fulfilled; Matth. iii. 13, 14, 15.

Had our blessed Saviour therefore been as free from imputed as he was from personal guilt, there was no law existing that could have enforced the necessity of any kind of suffering or obedience, that would have the least tendency to benefit the guilty. The moral law could only have demanded obedience to its precepts, and that kind of obedience that quadrated with the nature of its requisitions: the moral law could never have required a compliance with the institutes of the Mosaic economy, for this economy was introduced to remove the guilt typically from the conscience, but where there was no guilt, as it would have been in the above instance, the purity of his mind would have superseded the necessity

of

Adam's covenant had been particular, and he sin ned only for himself, then Adam only must be kept from it, and not all men.

Fourthly. Because the earth is cursed for his sake, Gen. iii. 17. If his sin had been his only, the curse could not have redounded to all the world, but must have extended no further than to Adam, as Cain's did.

Fifthly. It appears, because after the fall, there is a promise of life universally published. Now,

of an offering, and the perfection of his life would have rendered circumcision unnecessary. It was this divine law that laid upon him the imperious necessity of suffering death; it was this that rendered it necessary, that he by whom the world was formed, should "become poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich;" it was this that rendered the poverty and disgrace of his birth necessary, poor, born in a stable, and his infantile existence preserved by being wrapped in swaddling clothes, disgraced, laying in a manger. The scene to me intimates such soul-humbling considerations as these, that though in that state, he still continued the God of heaven and earth, and the sole object of religious adoration. "Yet for us men and for our salvation," he was willing not only to be numbered with transgresssors, but also to sink deeper into every

Now, if Adam's sin had been imputed only to him, then all his posterity must have come to the tree of knowledge, and had their trial there; and as many as did eat, be turned out, or they had not fair play for their game; and as many as did not eat, be kept in the garden, without toil, or sickness, or death. Oh! how are all the sons of Adam at sueh labor to return into that Paradise again, but cannot find the way.-What, has your father Adam ventured upon the evil for an

un

kind of misery thar. we possibly could; born among the beast!-Does it not, in all the emphasis of woe inform us, such was your guilt, such was the demerit of your sin, that in order to save you, I not only voluntarily engaged to suffer the common calamities incident to human life, but also to be treated by my Father, and that in the most public manner, as a being (apparently) of an inferior order; and after a life of the most painful suffering, to die an ignominious death, (the death of a thief or a murderer) and marked as the victim of the same distressing poverty, as attended my birth! See him fastened to the bloody tree, his blessed body covered with its own gore; and while yet warm as it flowed from his bleeding veins, it drops upon his cruel murderers, while they, ferocious as wolves, gulped it as it fell it smoked, and the smoke ascended