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whereby the infinitive, added to a verb, including a like action, is generally redundant;" such as Judges xii. 19. and acting, he acted wonderously, that is, he acted wonderously. 1 Kings xiv. 9, and doing, thou hast done evil, that is, thou hast done evil. 2 Kings xxi. 6. and working, he multiplied wickedness, that is simply, he multiplied wickedness, or he wrought much wickedness. 2 Chron. xx. 85. he doing, did wickedly, he doing is redundant. Psal. cxxvi. 2. the Lord doing, has done great things for them, doing is again redundant. Eccl. ii. 11. on the labour, that doing I bad laboured, that is simply, I had laboured. Which last passage is entire ly parallel with this in Genesis, for, whether you say, hwpb 12 he doing, laboured, or now he making, created, you say the same thing: unless that aba signifies to produce something new, without any precedent or pattern, and which had no existence before;" therefore, he making, created, is no other than, he made something new. These things neither could, nor ought to be unknown to this learned person, considering his great skill in Hebrew learning. 4thly. He ought not to have made such a distinction barely and without any proof between the words 12, 1, and wy, which are used by Isaiah, xliii. 7. as if the first intends the creation of the soul; the second, the formation of the body, and the third, the reformation by grace: there not being the least foundation for it in scripture. For, 1. 72 sometimes signifies reformation by grace, as Psalm. li. 10. Create in me a clean heart. 2. 18 is sometimes applied to the soul, Zech. xii. ver. 1. and formeth the spirit of man within him and Psalm xxxiii. ver. 15. and fashioneth their hearts alike; sometimes too it denotes formation by grace; as Isa. xliii. 21. this people have I formed for myself, they shall shew forth my praise. 3. wy is more than once used for the first formation of man; as Gen. i. 26. Let us make man: and Gen. ii. 18. I will make him an help meet for him; Jer. xxxviii. 16. that made us this soul, says king Zedekiah to Jeremiah, without having any thoughts of a reformation by grace. As therefore all these words are so promiscuously used in scripture, ought we not to look upon him, who distinguishes them in such a magisterial manner, as one who gives too much scope to his own fancy? And what if one should invert the order of our author, and positively assert, that here denotes, reformation by grace, as Psalm li. 10. the production of the soul, as Ezek. xii. 1. and the formation of the body, as Gen. ii. 8. What reply could the learned person make? But these are weak arguments. It is more natural to take these words in Isaiah, as meant of the new creation and reformation by grace. And this ac

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with ver. 4. For thus the words run: "These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and heavens, and every plant of the field, before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field," &c. Or, as the learned De Dieu shews, they may otherwise be very properly rendered, " in the day that the Lord made the heavens and the earth, there was yet no plant of the field created," &c. So that this formation of the earth and heavens was prior to man's own creation, much more to the fall, and to the restitution from the fall. And this verse wholly overturns the distinction which this learned person has invented.

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XXVIII. And as we have thus shewn, that the words of Moses neither mention nor intimate any work by which God restored all things from the fall on the seventh day; so neither of any rest from the work of restoration, which is the foundation of the rest of the Sabbath. For, 1st. It is irrational to suppose, that when God promised the Messiah, he then rested from the work of the gracious reformation of the universe; because that promise was a prophecy of the sufferings, conflicts, and at the last of the death of Christ, by which that reformation was to be brought about and accomplished. 2dly. How can it be said that God rested, immediately after having made that promise, from all his work, when directly upon it he pronounced, and executed sentence upon Adam, Eve, and the earth that was cursed fortheir crime, and expelled them paradise? which work (to speak after the manner of men, compare Isa. xxviii. 21.) was truly a greater labour to God than the very creation of the world. And thus, instead of a Sabbath which Moses describes, this day is made one of the most laborious to God. 3dly. The Sabbath day after the publication of the first gospel promise, was doubtless sacred to the Messiah, and to be celebrated to his honour by the saints with a holy exultation of soul. Nor shall I be much against the learned person, should he choose to translate, Isa. lviii. 13. that the Sabbath may be called, "a delight, on account of the holy of the Lord being glorified;" but it cannot with any probability be inferred from this, that the promise of the Messiah was the foundation of the first Sabbath, since the Sabbath, as well as other things, did not acquire that relation till after the fall. 4thly. The scriptures in express terms declare, that the rest of God from the work of the first creation which was completed in six days, was the foundation of the Sabbath. "In six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested on the seventh day; wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it," Exod. xx. 11. Which being plain, it sufficiently, if I mistake not,

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appears, that it is much safer to go in the old and beaten path, which is the king's high way, than in that other new trodden and rough one, which the learned person, whose opinion we have been examining, has chosen to tread in. And so much for this subjecting lan

CHAP. VIII.

Of the Violation of the Covenant of Works on the part of Man

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1. As the scripture does not declare, how long this covenanty thus ratified and confirmed, continued unbroken, we are› satisfied to remain in the dark. And we would have a holy dread of presuming rashly to fix the limits of a time which is really uncertain. It is however evident, that man, wickedly pre suming to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree, incurred the guilt of violating the covenant. Nor ought that to be deemed a small sin, (as the apostle, Rom. v. calls it, the offence, disobedience, and transgression) because it may seem to have been commit ted about a thing of no great importance: For the meaner the thing is, from which God commanded to abstain, and for which man despised the promise of the covenant, makes his transgression of it the more heinous as may be illustrated by the profaneness of Esau, which was so much the greater, as the mess was of so little value, for which he sold his birth-right, Heb. xii. 16. In that sin, as divines generally observe, there was, as it were, a kind of complication of many crimes. But it is our chief purpose to shew, that this was the violation of the whole covenant: for not only that tree, as we proved above, was a sacrament of the covenant, the abuse of which ought to be looked upon as a violence done to the whole; not only the precept con cerning that tree, which was the trial of universal obedience, but likewise the covenant in its whole constitution, was violated by that transgression; the law of the covenant was trampled upon, when man, as if he had been his own lord and master in all things, did, in defiance of his Lord, lay hold on what was not his property, and throw off the yoke of obedience that was due to God: the promises of the covenant were set less by than a transitory gust of pleasure, and the empty promises of the se ducer; and that dreadful death which the author of the covenant threatened the transgressor with, not considered and thought of in all its dreadful effects, but he presumed to act in opposition to it. And thus Adam transgressed the covenant, Hos vi. 7.

II. Though Eve had the first hand in this crime, yet it is usu ally in scripture ascribed to Adam: by one man sin entered into the world, according to Paul, Rom. v. 12. whom ver. 14 he declares to be Adam: For Adam was the head of the covenant,

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with whom, even before the creation of Eve, God seems to. have transacted. Adam was the root of all mankind, and even of Eve herself, who was formed out of one of his ribs; neither is it customary to deduce a genealogy from a woman nor was the covenant judged to be entirely broken, till Adam also added his own crime to that of his wife's. Then it was that the Creator, first acting in the character of a judge, summoned to his bar the inconsiderate pair, already condemned by their own conscience. But we are not to think that this inheritance of sin was so derived from our father Adam, as to excuse our mother Eve from that guilt: for as by marriage they were made one flesh, so far they may be considered as one man. Nay, Adam is not considered as the bead and root of mankind, but in conjunction with his wife. To this purpose is what Malachi (ch. ii. 15.) says, that God, seeking a godly seed, made one: one pair, two into one flesh.

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III. It was doubtless a wicked spirit who seduced man to this apostacy, and who, tormented with the horrors of his guilty conscience, envied man his happiness in God, and God the pleasure he had in man, and sought to have the wretched consolation of making one a partaker of his misery. And, the more easily to insinuate himself into man's favour by his ensnaring discourse, he concealed himself in the serpent, the most subtle of all animals, and at that time not less acceptable to man, than the rest of the obsequious creatures. The great du Moulin, disput. iii. de Angelis, § 44. conjectures this serpent was of a conspicuous form, with fiery eyes, decked with gold, and marked with shining spots, so as to draw the eyes of Eve to it, and that he had before that time more than once insinuated himself by his soothing sounds, into Eve's favour, in order that having preconceived a good opinion of him, she might be brought the more readily to yield to him. In fine, he was such, that what Moses says of the subtilty of the serpent must be applied to him only, and not to the whole species. To this conjecture it is also added, that Eve, perhaps such was her simplicity, did not know whether God had bestowed the use of speech on any other animals besides man. Laurentius Camirez in his Pentecontarch, c. i. (quoted by Bochart, Hierozoic, lib. i. c. iv. p. 30.) goes a step farther, and feigns that Eve was wont to play with the serpent, and adorn her bosom, neck, and arms with it; and hence at this day the ornaments for those parts have the resemblance of serpents, and are called opus, serpents, by the Greeks.

IV. But all this is apocryphal. We are not to advance such romantic things without any scripture authority. Whether this was the first, or the only apparition of the serpent, as having the use of speech, I shall neither boldly affirm, nor obstinately de

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