SERMON III.

Preached before The KING, at the Chapel Royal, in 1791.

1 Cor. XV. 22.

AS IN ADAM ALL DIE, EVEN SO IN

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CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE.

LOOK upon the Text which I have

now read to you, to be one of the most important in the whole Bible; it speaks to us of life and of death; and these surely, to every human being, are subjects of unspeakable concernment: it explains to us the cause of our greatest anxiety, and the occasion of our greatest consolation; for what anxiety can be compared to that which arises from the daily expectation of death? and what consolation

consolation can be so powerful, as the assurance that we shall not die eternally, that death shall not always have dominion over us?

In treating of this subject, I will endeavour to prove to you two propositions; they are both of them highly worthy of your attention:

1. That the dispensation of Death which passed upon all men from Adam's transgression, is a dispensation in no wise inconsistent with divine Justice.

2. That the dispensation of Life which came upon all men from the obedience of Christ, is a signal, and on our part unmerited, instance of divine Mercy.I proceed with the first.

We know little concerning Adam's situation in Paradise, except this, that had he continued innocent, he would not have been obnoxious either to pain or death. Some, indeed, have affirmed, that Adam was as naturally mortal as we are; and have suffered in this, as in many other matters, their ignorance of God's proceeding

proceeding to become to them a reason for misinterpreting his word. How the bodily frame of the first Man, if in every thing it resembled ours, could have been perpetually preserved from external injury and internal decay; how the Garden in which he was placed could have been large enough to hold his future progeny, if that progeny had been multiplied in the same proportion that ours is,-God knoweth it surpasses our ability to

determine the manner in which either matter could have been effected; but we are certain, notwithstanding, of this, that had he not transgressed he would not have died, at least he would not have died that death which is now come upon us all. He was told-"Of the tree of the

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knowledge of Good and Evil thou shalt "not eat of it: for in the day that thou "eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." Hence we draw this undoubted inference, that if he had not eaten he would not have died he did eat, "and so death passed

upon himself and upon all other men,

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even upon them who had not sinned after. "the similitude of his trangression."

The nature of this death has not always been understood by interpreters of Scripture in the same way, nor are they yet come to any unity of opinion on the subject. Many have thought, and there are some who think so still, that by the phrase-thou shalt surely die-is meant a spiritual death, a debasement of all the fine faculties of the Soul, with which God is supposed to have originally endowed it, a total corruption of every good principle, and an introduction of every vicious propensity: Others understand by it, a consignment of body and soul to everlasting torments: God himself, I think, explains it by an utter extinction of Being, a deprivation of the blessings of life, a returning to the insensibility of the ground from whence Man was taken; "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." The expression itself-thou shalt surely or utterly die-occurs in many other places of the Old Testament. When

Abimelech

Abimelech forbad his people from having any unlawful commerce with the wife of Isaac, he ratified his command in the same words in which God prohibited Adam from the taste of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil-He that toucheth this man or his wife, shall surely die. When Saul wanted to slay David, he said to Jonathan-Send and fetch him unto me, for he shall surely die. Now neither Abimelech or Saul had any other power than that of inflicting a temporal death, they could neither vitiate the moral nature, nor doom to everlasting torments the Souls of those who disobeyed their commands. The power of God over us is, we acknowledge it, unlimited; he may mar the work that he hath made, and destroy both body and soul in Hell; yet cannot we be certain that his threat to Adam imported any thing more than what is usually, I had well nigh said than what is always, meant by the same phrase in other parts of Scripture a corporal death, a putting

an