ousness and life through Christ, we acknowledge, with infinite comfort, to be proper expressions of real benefits: surely then, the sin and death by Adam must be real effects also; answering, by opposition, to the former. But righteousness by Christ is a justification from past sins, as appears from the former part of the Epistle; therefore the sin by Adam, to which the former refers, must be a real state of guilt and condemnation.

WE repeat it again, that the consideration of this comparison, instituted by the Apostle upon a survey of real effects; and upon a just, and, in the economy of the Divine dispensations, a fore-ordained, correspondence of those effects to the consequences of Adam's sin; forbids us to assign to his expressions any meaning, but that which preserves the genuine force of the terms, both in themselves, and with respect to the opposite terms and, therefore, when the Apostle says, that in Adam all sinned, and that by one man's disobedience many were made sinners; we will not dilute his sense by figurative meanings, or destroy the analogy by forced interpretations; but understand the terms sin, and sinners, as proper expressions of real effects.-Hear, I beseech

you, the Apostle himself: " Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, in that all sinned;" or, inasmuch as all sinned, (εp' y tavtes ǹμapTOV) i. e. in Adam: (Ver. 12.) And again; "For as by the disobedience of one man the many were made sinners; so also by the obedience of one shall the many be made righteous." (Ver. 19.)

HOWEVER, this being evidently the very heart of the cause, those who are resolved to exclude Original Sin, are obliged to assign an improper, i. e. a figurative meaning to sin in this place. What then shall that meaning be? By a Metonymy of the Crime for the Punishment, Sin, they say, is put for Death, (meaning Natural Death) the punishment of sin: "and so death passed upon all men, inasmuch as all became mortal."-Now to say nothing of the forced sense which this interpretation puts upon the word sin; nor of its destroying one of the terms of the comparison; (for if Sin and Death be the same, then we have two terms only on Adam's side) we may observe that it militates directly against the relation under which the Apostle views sin and death in this place. "As by one man sin en

tered into the world, and death by sin:" He speaks, you perceive, of sin as the cause, and of death as the effect: "sin entered into the world, and death by sin:" (Compare vi. 23.)—he goes on; "and so death passed upon all men ;"Wherefore ? εφ' ᾧ παντες ἡμαρτον ; surely, "Because all men sinned," viz. in Adam. But this propriety of the Apostle's manner of speech is destroyed by the new interpretation, which confounds the cause with the effect.-This then being fatal, as I conceive it will be allowed, to the interpretation which would give a figurative meaning to sin in this place; we are left in possession of our former conclusion, that sin here is to be taken in its proper sense; and of the consequence thence resulting, That the first part of the doctrine of Original Sin, viz. the state of guilt and condemnation in which mankind were placed by Adam's transgression, is delivered by St. Paul, in the 5th Chapter of the Epistle to the Romans *

2. THE second part of the doctrine, viz. the corruption of nature, and proneness to evil, derived from Adam to all his posterity, we affirm

*See Note (B).

to be delivered by the same Apostle, in the 7th Chapter of his Epistle; in that very remarkable description which he gives, of the wretched condition of the natural, unregenerate man.

He had finished the subject of Justification in the 5th Chapter: in the 6th, he passes to that of Sanctification, or that purity of heart and life which is required of men under the Gospel Covenant: this subject he treats in the 6th, 7th, and 8th Chapters.

In the 14th Verse of the 6th Chapter, he advances an argument for the Sanctification of Christians, which at first hearing may sound somewhat strange; For, says he, sin shall not have dominion over you; for ye are not under the Law, but under Grace.'

66

IN which argument, or reason, (besides the distinct affirmation, that Christians, whether Jewish or Gentile converts, are free from the Law,) this proposition is clearly implied, That the Law was less effectual than the Gospel, to the purposes of Sanctification. This proposition he prosecutes at length in the 7th Chapter; and by one of those masterly comprehensions of

TEXT

argument, so frequent in this Epistle, at the same time that he vindicates the excellency of the Law as a Rule of duty; thus propitiating the attention of the Jew, so jealous for the honour of his law; he shews its inefficacy as a means of Sanctification; and draws that striking picture of the hopeless condition of the unregenerate Jew; a condition the more hopeless, the more excellent and spiritual the precepts of the Law appeared in reality to be of all which the result, in the mind of the Jew, must be, a conviction of the necessity of fleeing for sanctification from the Law to the Gospel.

In what then, you will ask, did the imperfection of the Law, as a means of Sanctification, consist? Clearly in this, according to the mind of the Apostle, that "it was weak through the flesh;" (VIII. 3.) and had nothing to oppose to the reigning power of sin in the members; or to that proneness to evil which exists in such force in the natural man:-in other words, the Law was destitute of that supernatural aid, which the Christian dispensation enjoys in the gifts of the Holy Spirit; and which can alone enable us to