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creatures; and in return for this love of God what should we do, but love him continually, ardently, and without a rival? Can we refuse to spend one day in seven in his immediate service, when he permits us to spend the rest in our lawful callings, not so to spend them that he shall be forgotten, but that whilst our hands are engaged below, our hearts may be uplifted, and even our hands be working with an intent that God may be glorified thereby. If then we love God supremely, can we refuse to love his creatures our brethren in the flesh, and this in two relations. 1st. Our earthly parents: these are God's representatives, and his honored means of bringing us into his life, his means also of preserving us in infancy, childhood, youth, even up to man, his means of providing for all our wants, of instructing us in necessary knowledge, in the cultivation of reason, both in necessary temporal science and with a due dependance on his Spirit, at which every parent should aim, in the knowledge of his God as the father of all flesh, but more especially of all his chosen in Christ Jesus. 2nd. All mankind. Can we then destroy his image, made at first, by a privilege given to no other creature in his likeness, and then constituted Lord of all below: can we debase it, by taking the members of Christ and making them the members of an harlot? Can we further deprive another of those blessings God has given him, and unjustly rob him of the same, or can we endeavour to blast his reputation, and rob

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him of the fairest jewel which a man possesses on this side the grave? Can we, lastly, envy our neighbour the enjoyment of his lawful comforts, bestowed gratuitously by God and earned by the sweat of his brow?

All these laws man has broken; yet we are not by that released from an obligation to fulfil the same: though not a covenant of works, they exist as a preceptive authority enforced by God on all his creatures, to be fulfilled by themselves or their surety, to whom as they are unable to fulfil them by themselves, they must by faith look up on pain of eternal death, and that surety is Christ the augel of the covenant, the righteousness and strength of his chosen people.

11th. John iii. 3. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.

The necessity of being born again, is loudly and repeatedly enforced in the Holy Scriptures; nor is it inconsistent with the nature of things: for if a man be dead whether as to his body, or as to his soul, as being in the latter case dead in trespasses and sins, he must experience a reviving power, operating upon him in his passive state, (and man is passive in the work of regeneration), before he can perform the functions of a rational or spiritual man. Not that in either case, a man must a second time enter into his mother's womb, but that in both

cases, he must return from a state of non-action and almost non-entity, like that of a babe before it is born, before he can again act like a man. This our Lord intimates in the 5th verse, on which I enlarge not now, lest I anticipate my subject, but on which I shall speak, when the nature of regeneration comes to be considered.

The necessity of regeneration may be enforced from many topics, as first, from the happiness temporal and eternal, which ́man by sin has lost, and which it behoves him out of even self-love to endeavour to regain, by any proper means which are put into his power: 2d. From the love of God which man ought to cherish, whom by his sin he hateth, which love is the very element of a pure, holy, and god-like spirit, the want of which, proves man in a state of enmity, and liable to the first and second death. 3d. From the love of God to us, whereby he loves a chosen remnant, and hath proposed to save them, through the sending of his Son. 4th. From its being the only method by which we can enter the kingdom of God. Of these in their order..

1st. From the happiness temporal and eternal, which man by sin has lost, and which it behoves him, even out of self-love, to endeavour to regain, by any proper means which are put into his hands.

In God's dealings with Adam before the fall we hear only this language, " In the day that thou "eatest thereof, thou shall surely die." What

shall we say to this, but that man, threatened with death in case of disobedience, and unable without God's Spirit to continue in persevering obedience, (which Spirit being withheld by God in consequence of the foreknown fall, and in consistence with his eternal purposes of grace to be unfolded thereupon) hath fallen, and is liable to temporal and eternal death therefrom? Nor do I conceive persevering obedience could have entitled Adam to eternal life, as a reward of the same. And for this reason, that as all things were formed for Christ's sake, and all evil permitted to shew forth and display to man, God's eternal counsels and covenant of grace, any thing received or claimed as a reward by Adam for obedience, would have militated with those eternal counsels as being a part of a covenant of works: every thing of which must be contrary to the method of salvation unfolded in the gospel of Christ's grace. But passing this by,

Man is become subject to eternal death, for the wages of sin is death. Even self-love, was not inducement enough to Adam to continue in obedience, when God's Spirit was suspended, as it is not sufficient to enable him to return to obedience, whilst the same suspension of God's Spirit continues. Now in this state of death, Adam had no more feeling for, and relish of the holiness of God, than if he had never been born. And though it may be fairly presumed (nay though it would be the utmost injustice to our covenant

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head Adam not to presume), that Adam never went the lengths of sin, which thousands of his posterity daily do; still in the sight of God by reason of his transgression, he stood as hateful as they do, till recovered by the grace of God in Jesus Christ revealed typically and imperfectly to him, yet so clearly, as that faith and hope might spring up in him, and a higher kind of love and gratitude than ever, might animate his bosom and cause him to rejoice in God. Could we trace the feelings of Adam's heart when he and Eve sewed fig-leaves together; when dissatisfied with so poor a covering for sin, they rushed as it were into the thickest of the trees of the garden of Eden, to hide themselves from the presence of the Lord, what should we see but a mixture of shame and remorse struggling against the agitations of a quick sighted yet newly polluted conscience, and endeavouring to hide, what its dictates would tell them, never could be hidden from the all-searching eye of God. Here too we see the strugglings of self-love in our first parents, without any of the influence of the Spirit of God; leading them to patch up a self-righteousness and tattered covering, which it was well for them that God in his grace removed aside, substituting a better, even the righteousness of faith. As good works done before the grace of Christ, and the inspiration of the Spirit are nothing worth, so self-love working in these before regeneration, can produce no holy fruit unto God, for the passions of the mind hav

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