his Epistle to the Romans.

The Jews were an elect

people, elected to receive a miraculous revelation, and ultimately to diffuse the light of the true religion over the earth. God used them for that especial purpose. The Greeks were an elect people, elected to be the most intellectual and cultivated upon earth, and to spread abroad the light of science and the refinement of intellectual culture. The Romans were an elect people, elected to subdue the world to the dominion of laws and the softening influence of arts and civilization. But it is not the doctrine of Scripture that the characters of individuals were chosen by God in these various nations, or that belonging to any one of them made a man either good or bad. God chose them for his purposes, and they chose their own characters in the exercise of their own free agency.

Christ chose his disciples. Eleven of them chose to be good men and true followers of their perfect Master, and, in consequence, became holy apostles and glorious martyrs, and their names are associated with their Master's to the end of time. Judas Iscariot, though himself elected to be a disciple, chose to be a bad man, to betray his Master, and thus to be consigned to everlasting execration and contempt.

So God chose the Israelites, and led them out of Egypt. Moses and Aaron chose to be faithful to their mission, and were the instruments of establishing the true religion in the earth. But Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, though belonging to God's chosen people, and themselves elected in that sense, chose to be vile conspirators, to rebel against God and Moses, and were swallowed up in sudden and awful destruction.

But the election of God to place all mankind in a

condition of inevitable damnation, in consequence of a sin not their own, and then the election of a few of these arbitrarily, "without regard to any thing seen in them or done by them," to glory and happiness, and the election to leave the rest, who were no better and no worse than the others, "to all the miseries of this life and the pains of hell for ever," is a species of election wholly inconsistent with the Divine perfections, and strips the Deity of every attribute which can command the homage

of the human heart.

15*

DISCOURSE XI.

A GOOD MAN IS HUMAN NATURE PERFECTED.

THERE WAS A MAN IN THE LAND OF UZ, WHOSE NAME WAS JOB; AND THAT MAN WAS PERFECT AND UPRIGHT, AND ONE THAT FEARED

GOD AND ESCHEWED EVIL. - Job i. 1.

De

THE object of this discourse is to call your attention to the definition which is here given of a perfect man, by one who lived at an age long antecedent to the disputes of modern times as to the constitutional character of human nature. The perfect man is one who fears God and eschews evil. Humanity is a part of God's creation, which is subjected to the law of development. Nothing can be developed which, in its rudiments and capacities, is not originally created. velopment, therefore, is governed and limited by original constitution. Every species of tree and plant has its type, which exists and is perpetuated in the seed. All its parts are intended to be proportioned to each other, the trunk to the branches, and the branches to the trunk. The leaves and the fruit are proportioned to both. Accident may prevent a full and symmetrical development, or may mutilate the tree in any stage of its growth, but

each seed is designed to produce a tree perfect after its kind. This original type continues the same from age to age.

So it is with animals. The different species are made what they are by original constitution. The lion and the fox are just what they were five thousand years ago. Their structure and propensities exactly fit them for the place they are intended to occupy, and the life they are designed to lead. The perfect lion is one in which the distinctive characteristics of the lion are fully carried out.

And so it is with man.

He, too, is a creature of de

velopment. There are in him at his creation the rudiments of every thing that can ever belong to him. The perfection of humanity is attained when these rudiments are developed in their true proportions. There is this difference, however, between the development of man and that of a plant or an animal. The development of a plant or an animal is directed and controlled by outward circumstances, in which the plant or animal is passive.

Man's development is in no small degree modified and controlled by himself, by his voluntary employment and direction of his own powers, by his own free will. Yet there is a law or rule of action, to which that free will itself is intended to be subjected, which law, if obeyed, leads to the perfection of human nature of a higher and nobler order, a voluntary perfection, the highest perfection of which our minds can form any conception.

The proposition contained, by implication, in our text, is, that the good man, the religious man, is the perfect man, or, in other words, is human nature developed in all its faculties and capacities in their natural and true

proportions. "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil."

The converse of this proposition must be equally true, that a bad man is human nature perverted, human nature wrongly and imperfectly, or disproportionately, developed, human nature in a state of deformity and mutilation.

This view of things, as I conceive, contains a flat contradiction to the commonly received doctrine of original sin. That doctrine is, that the type of human nature, that is, its elementary constitution, became essentially changed by the Fall. Before the Fall, man was created after the image of God, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, having the law of God written on his heart, and power to fulfil it. He had freedom and power to will and to do that which is good and well pleasing to God. But by the Fall he became wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body; became utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all that is good, and wholly inclined to all evil, wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation.

of the essential The proportion

This amounts to an entire change type and constitution of human nature. between the elements of human nature was altered. Human nature developed according to its original type and constitution would have been something entirely different from human nature developed according to its present constitution. A perfect man, according to the type of humanity before the Fall, and by a proportionate development of the elements of his nature, would have been a good man, a religious man, for he was endowed with