:

4

man, we are not to omit now those characters of majesty that God imprinted upon the body. He drew some traces of his image upon this also; as much as a spiritual substance could be pictured upon a corporeal. As for the sect of the Anthropomorphites, who from hence ascribe to God the figure of a man, eyes, hands, feet, and the like, they are too ridiculous to deserve a confutation. They would seem to draw this impiety from the letter of the scripture sometimes speaking of God in this manner. Absurdly; as if the mercy of scripture expressions ought to warrant the blasphemy of our opinions. And not rather show us, that God condescends to us, only to draw us to himself; and clothes himself in our likeness, only to win us to his own. The practice of the papists is much of the same nature, in their absurd and impious picturing of God Almighty but the wonder in them is the less, since the image of a deity may be a proper object for that, which is but the image of a religion. But to the purpose: Adam was then no less glorious in his externals; he had a beautiful body, as well as an immortal soul. The whole compound was like a well-built temple, stately without, and sacred within. The elements were at perfect union and agreement in his body; and their contrary qualities served not for the dissolution of the compound, but the variety of the composure. Galen, who had no more divinity than what his physic taught him, barely upon the consideration of this so exact frame of the body, challenges any one upon an hundred years study, to find how any the least fibre, or most minute particle, might be more commodiously placed, either for the advantage of use or comeliness; his stature erect, and tending upwards to his centre; his countenance majestic and comely, with the lustre of a native beauty, that scorned the poor assistance of art, or the attempts of imitation; his body of so much quickness and agility, that it did not only contain, but also represent the soul for we might well suppose, that where God did deposit so rich a jewel, he would suitably adorn the case. It was a fit workhouse for sprightly vivid faculties to exercise and exert themselves in. A fit tabernacle for an immortal soul, not only to dwell in, but to contemplate upon : where it might see the world without travel; it being a lesser scheme of the creation, nature contracted, a

little cosmography, or map of the universe. Neither was the body then subject to distempers, to die by piecemeal, and languish under coughs, catarrhs, or consumptions. Adam knew no disease, so long as temperance from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician; and innocence and abstinence would have kept him healthful to immortality.

Now the use of this point might be various, but at present it shall be only this; to remind us of the irreparable loss that we sustained in our first parents, to show us of how fair a portion Adam disinherited his whole posterity by one single prevarication. Take the picture of a man in the greenness and vivacity of his youth, and in the latter date and declensions of his drooping years, and you will scarce know it to belong to the same person: there would be more art to discern, than at first to draw it. The same and greater is the difference between man innocent and fallen. He is, as it were, a new kind or species; the plague of sin has even altered his nature, and eaten into his very essentials. The image of God is wiped out, the creatures have shook off his yoke, renounced his sovereignty, and revolted from his dominion. Distempers and diseases have shattered the excellent frame of his body; and, by a new dispensation, immortality is swallowed up of mortality. The same disaster and decay also has invaded his spirituals: the passions rebel, every faculty would usurp and rule; and there are so many governors, that there can be no government. The light within us is become darkness; and the understanding, that should be eyes to the blind faculty of the will, is blind itself, and so brings all the inconveniences that attend a blind follower under the conduct of a blind guide. He that would have a clear, ocular demonstration of this, let him reflect upon that numerous litter of strange, senseless, absurd opinions, that crawl about the world, to the disgrace of reason, and the unanswerable reproach of a broken intellect.

The two great perfections, that both adorn and exercise man's understanding, are philosophy and religion: for the first of these; take it even amongst the professors of it, where it most flourished, and we shall find the very first notions of common sense debauched by them. For there have

been such as have asserted, that there is no such thing in the world as motion; that contradictions may be true. There has not been wanting one, that has denied snow to be white. Such a stupidity or wantonness had seized upon the most raised wits, that it might be doubted, whether the philosophers or the owls of Athens were the quicker sighted. But then for religion; what prodigious, monstrous, misshapen births has the reason of fallen man produced! It is now almost six thousand years, that far the greatest part of the world has had no other religion but idolatry and idolatry certainly is the first-born of folly, the great and leading paradox; nay, the very abridgment and sum total of all absurdities. For is it not strange, that a rational man should worship an ox, nay, the image of an ox? that he should fawn upon his dog? bow himself before a cat? adore leeks and garlic, and shed penitential tears at the smell of a deified onion? Yet so did the Egyptians, once the famed masters of all arts and learning. And to go a little further; we have yet a stranger instance in Isa. xliv. 14, A man hews him down a tree in the wood, and part of it he burns, in ver. 16. and in ver. 17, with the residue thereof he maketh a god. With one part he furnishes his chimney, with the other his chapel. A strange thing, that the fire must consume this part, and then burn incense to that. As if there was more divinity in one end of the stick than in the other; or as if it could be graved and painted omnipotent, or the nails and the hammer could give it an apotheosis. Briefly, so great is the change, so deplorable the degradation of our nature, that, whereas before we bore the image of God, we now retain only the image of men.

In the last place, we learn from hence the excellency of Christian religion, in that it is the great and only means that God has sanctified and designed to repair the breaches of humanity, to set fallen man upon his legs again, to clarify his reason, to rectify his will, and to compose and regulate his affections. The whole business of our redemption is, in short, only to rub over the defaced copy of the creation, to reprint God's image upon the soul, and (as it were) to set forth nature in a second and a fairer edition.

The recovery of which lost image, as it is God's pleasure to command, and our duty to endeavor, so it is in his power only to effect.

To whom be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and for evermore. Amen.

SERMON III.

INTEREST DEPOSED, AND TRUTH RESTORED: OR A WORD IN SEASON,

DELIVERED IN TWO SERMONS:

THE FIRST AT ST. MARY'S IN oxford, on THE 24TH OF JULY, 1659, BEING THE TIME OF THE ASSIZES: AS ALSO OF THE FEARS AND GROANS OF THE NATION, IN THE THREATENED AND EXPECTED RUIN OF THE LAWS, MINISTRY, AND UNIVERSITIES. THE OTHER PREACHED BEFORE THE HONORABLE SOCIETY OF LINCOLN'S INN.

TO THE RIGHT WORSHIPFUL EDWARD ATKINS, SERGEANT-AT-LAW, AND FORMERLY ONE OF THE JUSTICES OF THE COMMON PLEAS.

TH

HONORED SIR,

HOUGH at first it was free, and in my choice, whether I should publish these discourses, yet the publication being once resolved, the dedication was not so indifferent; the nature of the subject, no less than the obligations of the author, styling them in a peculiar manner yours: for since their drift is to carry the most endangered and endangering truth, above the safest, when sinful, interest; as a practice upon grounds of reason the most generous, and of Christianity the most religious; to whom rather should this assertion repair as to a patron, than to him whom it has for an instance? Who, in a case of eminent competition, chose duty before interest; and when the judge grew inconsistent with the justice, preferred rather to be constant to sure principles, than to an unconstant government: and to retreat to an innocent and honorable privacy, than to sit and act iniquity by a law; and make your age and conscience (the one venerable, the other sacred) drudges to the tyranny of fanatic, purjured usurpers. The next attempt of this discourse is a defense of the ministry, and that, at such a time, when none owned them upon the bench, (for then you had quitted it ;) but when, on the contrary, we lived to hear one in the very face of the university, (as it were in defiance of us and our profession,) openly in his charge to defend the Quakers and fanatics, persons not fit to be named in such courts, but in an indictment. But, sir,