deceivers, when they urged this text, took care to suppress the words immediately preceding those they have alleged, Without faith it is impossible to please God; in which it is most certain the apostle meant faith in God, as reconciled in and through Christ; and faith in Christ as a mediator, which is a thing not known by the light of nature. Without faith in Christ, it is impossible for any to be acceptable to God; for whoever comes to him, so as to meet with a kind reception, must believe that he is a just and a holy God, and as such can only reward his fallen creatures, who diligently seek him, in and through a Mediator, on the account of his merit, and not on the account of any fancied desert in them; seeing they are so far from laying him under any obligation by what their hands can find to do, that they would not be able to answer for the sins that cleave to their best performances, if he was to deal with them as an absolute God.

To take notice but of one thing more, the sufficiency of reason to be man's guide, is urged,* from the wise king Solomon's declaring, Eccles. vii. 29. that God made man upright: but this truly great master of reason knew better; for he declared it to be the result of his long and diligent search after wisdom, that reason is not a sufficient guide, by reason of man's apostacy from God, by which it is corrupted: his words are; This only have I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions. The latter part of the words the antiscriptural tribe have suppressed, as if they could not quote scripture in a way different from the author of evil. God made man upright, his understanding was without sinful defects, but in his primeval state his reason was not a sufficient rule, for he needed instruction from God; the case of his posterity is worse, their reason is depraved and corrupted; they not only are ignorant of many things, but they are prone to follow errors, to run into dangerous mistakes, and to please themselves with many idle inven. tions; among which this is not the least pernicious,

* Plea, &c. p. 53.

that sinful creatures should have the impudence to assert, that reason or the light of nature, in their present state, is a sufficient guide to them in religious matters. APPLICATION.

Seeing pride is at the bottom of all the opposition, which is made to the revelation afforded us by God, and seeing it is this makes vain and conceited men cry up reason as a perfect rule, to the disparagement of revelation, it cannot be an unseasonable admonition to professed Christians, nay, to all who pretend to be searching after truth, to be careful how they give way to a proud conceit of their own understandings. The high thoughts which creatures have entertained of their own intellectual abilities, have been the source and spring of all the apostacy and rebellion against the Most High, which we have been acquainted with. Whatever was the particular sin, which occasioned the thrusting of Satan, and all the legions of the heavenly hosts, which banded under his ensigns against the Highest, it is pretty certain that it took its rise from pride. This we may easily gather from a passage of the apostle Paul, wherein he prescribes it as a standing rule, that a bishop or pastor of a Gospel church, must not be a novice, which is not so much meant of one young in years, as of one who had newly taken up a profession of the Christian faith, and was but raw in the knowledge of the doctrines of revelation; the reason why a pastor ought not to be a novice is, 1 Tim. iii. 16, "Lest being lifted up, or blown up, with pride, he should fall into the condemnation of the devil." If pride was the cause of the devil's condemnation, it must be twisted with his first sin. It was a proud imagination, that they could make their condition better, than that in which the wisdom of a beneficent Creator had placed them, which drew a great number of the potentates of heaven to rise in rebellious arms against the God from whom they received their being; and it was a vain desire of being higher than they were made by the sovereign Lord of nature, that engaged thousands of angels in impious league

against their King, for which they were cast out of heaven, and are doomed to spend eternal ages in woe and pain; they are now suffered to range about the world, but still they are, as it were, in chains; but, at the last and the great day, they will receive fulness of torment; and, being shut up in hell, they will groan for ever under the weight of Almighty vengeance, which will glorify itself in punishing them for their pride and rebellion. It was also pride which was the source of the woe we feel, by reason of the fall of our first parents. It does not appear, from the Scripture account of the first apostacy of man, that the devil could plant any temptation on our progenitors, till he had blown them up to a proud conceit, that they could make their condition happier than it was, by transgressing the law of their Creator. When the tempter attacked our general mother, Gen. iii. 56. as he endeavoured to work her up to an imagination, that it was through envy that God debarred her husband and her from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, lest they should be like him in knowledge, he laboured to raise pride in her, by assuring her, that if she once tasted of the fruit which she feared to touch, she should tower to divinity, or be like God in knowledge, What he urged was this; "God knows that in the day you eat of it, then your eyes shall be opened, and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." It was this sly suggestion that made the first of women look with eager longing eyes on the goodly fruit, which hung on the forbidden tree; and it was a persuasion that she should rise in knowledge, which induced her in an evil hour, to reach forth her rash hand, to pluck and eat what plunged her into ruin. And it is very likely, by urging the arguments which the devil had used to induce her to undo herself, that she prevailed on our common father to follow her example, out of a vain conceit of having a part with her in her imagined happiness, and so to conplete the first transgression.

It must be owned, that our first parents did gain knowledge by eating the forbidden fruit, but it was

knowledge they had better have been without; it was an experimental knowledge of what was evil. They soon found their eyes opened; but what was this to discover? It was to shew them, that their minds were darkened; that innocence, which as a veil had shaded them from knowing ill, was gone; that they had lost the image of their mighty Maker. which before shone in them in wisdom, and severe and pure sanctity; that they were stripped of their just confidence, primitive integrity, original righteousness, and native honour; and that they were left naked to guilty shame.—This was the unhappy prospect which presented itself to them, when they first opened their eyes to behold evil; and this knowledge may be said to be dearly bought, by the loss of pleasures and joys, which were sufficient to satiate their craving desires, and would, if they had continued in honour, have lasted for ever.

Thus we find from Scripture, that pride and self-sufficiency, have been causes of all the evils, which have invested the intellectual world; of the apostacy of many thousands of the princes of light, and of the defection of our first parents, by which sin and woe have been entailed on us, their unhappy posterity: And when we see such direful effects following pride, if we regard our true interest, we shall stand at a distance from a sin that is so affronting to God. When men cry up the sufficiency of reason; when they refuse to assent to the mysteries of Revelation, because they cannot comprehend the manner of them; and when they will not be content without being wise above what is written; they only follow the example of the angels that sinned, and of the first man, who, when he was in honour, continued not, but made himself and his posterity more miserable than the brutes that perish. They shew they are under the influence of that impure apostate spirit, who seduced their first parents to break the covenant with their God, and that they are the true descendants of the unhappy pair, who lost their primeval glory out of a foolish desire of being independant of God, and knowing more than he thought fit to reveal.

H

Considering these things, let us not be lifted up with pride, on account of our rational attainments, but let us be humble from a sense of the imperfection of our reason, and let a sense of this imperfection put us upon thinking on our fall and apostacy from God: let us be thankful that we are not left to the dim light of nature, but that we have a more sure directory, in the written word of God, than could be obtained by us, if we were left to the guidance of our own reason: let us prize and value the scriptures, which give us an account of our salvation by Christ; let us search into them, and with reverance, receive the mysteries which are revealed in them, which may be above our full comprehension; but let us never attempt to be wise above what is written, by affecting to know the mode of these mysteries which is not revealed; and let us at all times be much in prayer to the Holy Spirit, that he would give us light into those great things of God, which the natural man receives not, but accounts foolishness, and which the man of mere rational attainments will never know, because they are spiritually discerned.

Now to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, three Divine Persons, but the one King eternal, immortal, invisible, and the only wise God, be honour and glory ascribed, henceforth and for evermore. Amen.

SERMON IL

ROM. i. 22.

Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

If we take for true the scripture account of the fall of our first parents, we shall find, that the desire of knowing more than God had revealed, was the spring of that apostacy from the Author of blessedness, the sad effects of which defection we now feel, and shall feel, as long as we continue our journey through this