self-love enough, and enmity enough against God in them, to quicken them to it. There is no doubt but the damned, if they could, would pull God out of his throne to have ease from those dreadful torments they undergo. And whatsoever fearful apprehensions we have of God in this world, are but the lower degrees of that hatred which the damned have in the highest. But that I may not send you so far as hell for a proof, I will assert, that the wishing, nay the endeavouring the destruction of God, is fundamentally and seminally in every one of our natures. I will appeal to yourselves; did none of you ever please yourselves sometimes in the thoughts, how happy you should be, how free in your lustful pleasures, if there were no God? Have Have you not one time or other, wished there were no law given above to restrain you, no conscience within to check you, no judge hereafter to sentence you? And can God be hated worse, than when the destruction of his inseparable perfections, his holiness, righteousness, are thought so desirable? It is a wishing the destruction of his being. Hatred is defined by one, to be appetitus amorendi rem aliquem.* As love is a desire of union, hatred must be a desire of separation. And Aristotle tells us, that hatred is an affection of a higher strain than anger, because it desires the rò un aya, the very not being of the hated object.

As the hatred of sin aims at the destruction of sin, and men's hatred of saints would cause their expulsion out of the world; so the hatred of God is a desire to despoil him of his being. And their not doing it, is not for want of an innate disposition, but for want of strength; for men hate God more than the best saint doth sin. All hatred includes a virtual murder. Whosoever hates his brother is a murderer, John 3. 15. If he who hates his brother is, in the court of exact judgment, a murderer of his

* Scaliger Exercit. 316. S. 1.

Hating the very Being of God.

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brother, he that hates God is a murderer of God. The more self-love we have, the more we shall hate that which we judge destructive to us; because the more we wish well to ourselves, the more we wish ill to that which we imagine contrary to our wellbeing. And since we hate those acts of God which flow from the righteousness of his nature, we consequently rise up to a hatred of God's being; because he could not be God, unless he loved righteousness, and hated iniquity; and he could not testify his love to the one, or his loathing to the other, but in encouraging goodness, and witnessing his anger against iniquity.

said in his heart.

And

Man would have God at the greatest distance from him; and there is no greater distance from being, than not being, Job 21. 14, who say unto God Depart from us. And Psal. 14. 1. The fool hath No God, as it is in the Hebrew; I wish there were no God, and this is founded upon sin for the reason rendered is, that they are corrupt, and have done abominable works. Hence is sin by some called deicidium, a slaughtering of God: because every sin being enmity to God, doth virtually include in its nature the destruction of God. since every man naturally is a child of the devil, and is acted by the diabolical Spirit, The spirit that now works in the children of disobedience, Eph. 2. 2; he must necessarily have that nature which his Father hath, and the infusion of all that venom which the Spirit that acts him is possessed with, though the full discovery of it may be restrained by various circumstances. And this assertion seems to be intimated in the death of Christ; for when we see, for the satisfaction of the dishonour done to God, Christ must die for sin, it intimates, that if it were possible, God should die by sin. If sin can be expiated by no less than the blood of God, it seems to imply, that in its own nature it aims at no less than the life of God;

because all God's punishments are founded in lege talionis, and are highly equitable.

For confirmation, that a state of nature is a state of enmity :-The very design of Christ's coming into the world being an errand of peace, and the management of this design both when he was conversant in the world, and since his ascension, being to reconcile God and man, to promote by his Spirit an acceptance of this reconciliation, plainly discovers the state man was in, wherein man injured God, and was punished by him for what need of piecing up a friendship, if there had not been an antecedent enmity?

There was a moral enmity against God on our parts, which must needs draw a legal enmity on God's part against us. But the apostle in Rom. 5. 10. declares it: If when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God. If when we were enemies, we, all of us; not the best saint on earth, nor the most illustrious glorified saint in heaven, but had once this black character of being God's enemy. Not a son of Adam but inherited this abominable character, and had this hostile disposition boiling up against God. Every man naturally is like the lake of Sodom, that no holy motion can flutter over it, but falls down dead, being choaked by those steams which exhale from the corruption of the heart. Haters of God, Rom. 1. 30. OEOSUYET'S SUYEW signifies to hate a thing as hell; it is derived from st, one of the poetical rivers of hell, and signifies a more intense and rooted hatred than the expression of the LXX, Psal. 139. 21. μισαντες θεὸν. The most desperate enemy God hath now in hell of mankind, had not a blacker soul at his nativity, than every one of us had at ours. Tit. 1. 16. The apostle tells us of some that denied God, though they profess they knew him. They knew him notionally, and denied him practically, yea every attribute of his, and his very being. Denied God! There are the characters of a deity engraven upon every man

Rebellious Nature of Sin.

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by nature, so deeply in men's consciences, that it is impossible for all the malice of the devil to raze it out. But if we make a judgment of men's hearts by the counterpart of them in their lives, and consider men's practices, which are the best indexes of their principles, we shall quickly find by tracing the streams how corrupt the fountain is.

This enmity is against the sovereignty of God. Men will not have God reign over them: They will not have God for their governor, nor his law for their rule. Our created arms cannot reach heaven, to pull God from his throne; but there is a radical disposition in man to do it, had he ability equivalent to his corruption. For what is the great quarrel between God and man, but this, whose will, and whose authority shall stand? While we exclude him from being the Lord of our hearts, we would exclude him from being the Lord of the world; for that unjust principle which doth deprive him of the heart, would deprive him also of the other: to which God hath no greater right, nor no juster title, than he hath to our heart, over which we will not let him reign.

Sin is therefore called rebellion; which is a denial of subjection to him as our Lord; it is an act of disloyalty, a breach of allegiance. As the Jews say of every judgment upon them, That there is some of the dust of the golden calf; i. e. something of the punishment of their first idolatry: so we may say, that in every sin there is a taint of that first prodigious ambition of our first parents, which cost them and their posterity so dear, viz. That we would be as gods, we would be God's equals, if not superiors.

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PART II.

ENMITY AGAINST GOD AS A SOVEREIGN.

In the breach of his law-Unwillingness to know itOr to be governed by any law of God-Offers violence to his laws-Hates his own conscience-Sets up another law in himself-Is at greater pains and charge to break God's law than is necessary to keep it-Doing right upon any principle rather than of obedience to God's will-Being more observant of the laws of men than of God's-Unwillingness to have God's laws observed by any-Taking pleasure in seeing his laws broken-Man sets up other sovereigns against God-Idols-Self-The worldSensual pleasure-Satan-Usurping God's prerogatives-Assuming titles and pretending to acts which belong only to God-Lording over the consciences of others Prescribing anti-scriptural rules of worship-Subjecting God's truth to the trial of human reason-Prying into futurity-Pronouncing upon the state of others.

THE enmity against the sovereignty of God, is in three things; 1. In the breach of God's laws. 2. In setting up other sovereigns. 3. In usurping God's prerogative.

First. In the breach of God's laws. That servant that doth not perform his master's command, doth virtually deny his authority. If obedience be a sign