THE

FIRST CAUSE OF

GOOD AND EVIL.

III LORD'S DAY.

Eccl. vii. 29. Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

Q. 6. Did God then create man so evil and perverse?

A. By no means; but God created man good, and after his own image, in righteousness and true holiness, that he might rightly know God his Creator, heartily love him, and live with him in eternal happiness to glorify and praise him.

Q. 7. Whence then proceeds this depravity of human nature ?

A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise; hence our nature is become so corrupt, that we are all conceived and born in sin.

HAPPY

is the man who knoweth the cause of things; for having such an insight into the nature of matters, he hath a wonderful delight in his contemplations. It tends more especially to render a person happy, that he knows the first cause of good and evil; since he learns thus to avoid the evil, and pursue the good, to praise the first cause of the good, and to detest the evil. If I know not the first cause of the good that I enjoy, I shall foolishly kiss my own hands: and if I understand not the origin of the evil that befalls me, I shall soon with the wicked Jews say, "The way of the Lord is not equal," Ezek. xxxiii. 17, 20. The foul head spring of all the errors, that have deluged the heathen, Jewish and Christian world hath bubbled up only from an ignorance of the true causes of good and evil. Many of the ancient heathens imagined that there were two God's, a good God, who was the cause of all that was good, and an evil God, who was the author of all that was shameful, hurtful and painful; and in this they were followed by the Manichees, otherwise called Chris

tians. Others thought that the cause of good and evil in man was the contrariety of his soul and body, two principles, or parts of man; which were opposed one to another. The ancient and modern Pelagians have adopted this opinion, and they say that the soul is created with a free will, and the body with a certain carnal concupisence, and that the former is the cause of good, and the latter of evil. It is also natural to the sinner, through self love, to excuse himself, and to accuse his Maker of the evil. It is an evil disposition, which he hath inherited of his father Adam, who said to the Lord, "The woman, whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat," Gen. iii. 12. Therefore if the foolish sinner shall become wise and happy, he must learn to ascribe righteousness to his Maker, and accuse himself to his own shame, that he is himself the cause of his destruction, like Daniel, who said, " O Lord, righteousness belongeth to thee, but to us, confusion of faces," Dan. ix. 7. Indeed nothing is more certain, than that God alone is the author of all happiness, and man the author of all his misery. Therefore the wisest of kings saith, Eccl. vii. 29. "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions."

It is therefore the glory, the wisdom and happiness of the reformed church, that she teaches more than all others who are out of her pale, that the Lord God alone is the source of all good, and the sinner the cause of all his evil, that she may thus humble miserable man by the knowledge of his misery, which he hath procured to himself, and may induce him to seek deliverance, and a happy consolation of the Lord. For to this end doth the instructor show him how evil and perverse he is, in the fifth question; and that God is not the cause thereof, in the sixth question; but he himself through his parents, in the seventh question.

There are therefore two particulars here, that require our illustration.

I. That the wickedness of man doth not proceed from God, Question six.

II. But from man himself, Question seven.

I. We have taught in the foregoing discourse, that "we are by nature prone to hate God and our neighbour." Nearly all those who are out of our church take occasion hence to slander us, as though we taught that God was the author of sin, and of our wickedness and perverseness, because we receive our nature from God. But we protest against this in the strongest terms, and say that God neither is, nor can be the author of sin. We proclaim to the whole world with Elibu, "Far be it from God that he should do wickedness, and

from the Almighty, that he should commit iniquity," Job xxxiv. 16. Sin is more contrary to the nature of God, than darkness to light, and hell to heaven: "He is not a God who hath pleasure in wickedness," Psalm v. 4. "He is of purer eyes than to behold evil, and he cannot look upon iniquity." Hab. i. 13. "Let no man say, when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man,” James i. 13. Neither can any one infer from our doctrine by a just consequence, that we represent God as the author of our wickedness and perverseness; for although our nature is of God, it was not created by God so wicked; for "God made man good:" so our church teaches with the catechism from the word of God, which saith, Gen. i. 31. "God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.".

And wherein doth that goodness consist? The Socinians say, in the essence and in the essential parts of man, without any original righteousness, and only in puris naturalibus, or that man was neither good nor evil, when he was created: they even maintain that man was created as ignorant as a child, not knowing that he was naked. And the Jesuits and Remonstrants proceed so far, that they dare maintain that there was a certain carnal lusting in man immediately after his creation, and that his flesh and lusts strove and rebelled against his reason and spirit. If this were so, man would have come out of his Maker's hands a sinful, ignorant and unholy creature. And this reproach ought therefore not to be cast upon us, but upon our adversaries; for it will naturally follow from these heterodox assertions, that God made man evil and perverse. But it will appear more clearly anon.

We teach better things concerning the innate goodness of man. We say that it consists in a moral and virtuous goodness whereby man is qualified, as a reasonable creature, to glorify his Maker; for the goodness of every creature consists in its possessing such per fections, as belong to the nature of that creature, that it may express and declare, in a manner agreeable to its nature, the glorious perfections of its Creator. Man being a reasonable creature, and therefore much more excellent than other creatures, ought to glorify God in a reasonable manner, and thus more than other creatures. But how could he glorify his Maker in a reasonable manner, if he were created without original righteousness, in such ignorance, and with a certain lusting against his spirit? The reasonable creature cannot exist in a state of indifference, or be neither good nor evil, any more than he can be neither alive nor dead: he must necessarily be. one or the other, either good or evil: and he cannot be good, unless

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he have a moral goodness, and be endued with a pure apprehension of God's perfections, and a sincere love to God, so as to know, love, enjoy and praise him. Solomon saith also, "that God made man upright," and he opposes that uprightness to "man's inventions which he hath sought out," and to his perverseness, Eccl. vii. 29. And therefore the instructor saith, "that God did not create man so wicked and perverse, but good, and thus after his image."

The Lord God having created the heaven, the earth and the sea, with all that in them is, "did last of all form man out of the dust of the earth, and he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; thus man became a living soul," Gen. ii. 7. " But as it was not good that man should be alone, God made Adam an help meet for him," even his wife, "out of one of his ribs," and brought her to him for his lawful wife. Adam also owned, took, and loved her as such, Gen. ii. 18-25. God gave them both also the law of marriage, that they should cleave to one another," Gen. ii. 24, 25, ❝ and be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth," Gen. i. 28, and thus "hath God made of one blood all the nations of men, to dwell upon the face of all the earth," Acts xvii. 26. That man might be the chief ornament of all God's works, God created him after his image. Therefore the Father, acting after the manner of men, excited, as it were, the Son and the Holy Ghost, to perform some great work in the creation of man, saying, Gen. i. 26. "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." It is absurd in the Papists to distinguish these two words so, as if "image" related to natural endowments, and likeness to graces and supernatural endowments, as though the image of God were not natural to man. Image and likeness denote the selfsame thing, and are joined together to express it with greater emphasis and force, and to show that the image was exceedingly like God, and a likeness that expressed and depicted God in man: one thing can be like another, as one egg may be like another, but it is not therefore an image of that other. But an image is something, which is fashioned after something else, and is therefore like it. Man was then made in the image of God, because God was the pattern after which he was made; and if I may so speak, because God depicted himself in man, and made man like himself. Not that God gave his essence and life, as he hath it in himself, to man; for in this manner "hath he given only to his Son to have life in himself," John v. 26. The Son of God alone is "the brightness of God's glory, and the express image of his person," Heb. i. 3. Neither is God a body after which the body of man was

formed, as the ancient Anthropomorphists imagined; for "God is a spirit," John iv. 24. But God made man so after his image, that he expressed a certain likeness of his communicable attributes in him, whereby he became "a partaker of the divine nature," 2 Peter i. 4. Not that God transferred his attributes to man, for he would then have made him a God: but that man was made after them, so is to possess a certain likeness to them, and that he obtained a certain sketch of those divine perfections.

-We must inquire more particularly wherein that image and likeness, in which man was made, consists. The soul, the spirit of man, which hath in itself an ability to act from itself, though in dependence on God, with understanding and will, is an image of God, and exhibits a certain likeness of God. Some maintain that the image of God doth not consist in the essence of the soul, but that the soul is only the panel, on which the image is expressed: we may assert that the soul is the panel of the moral and virtuous goodness of man. But that the soul itself is not the image of God, but only the panel and subject of God's image, this we do not assert, because the nature of the thing and the word of God forbid it. For the essence and the spirituality of the soul are matters, in which it is like God, "who is a spirit," John iv. 24. Are not the heathens, who are destitute of the moral and virtuous goodness of God's image, still "the offspring of God," so far as he is a spirit, which cannot be expressed by an image? Acts xvii. 28, 29. We may "not curse, nor kill any man, because he is made in the image and likeness of God," Gen. ix. 6. James iii. 9. Not because he was once made in the image of God; but because he is still God's image: for otherwise the reason why we may not kill or curse any man ceaseth. Doth the sinner now "come short of" the image and "glory of God," according to Rom. iii. 23, it is with respect to the virtuous goodness, in which he was created. This moral and virtuous goodness is indeed the principal and most glorious part of God's image. It is also called original righteousness, and consists (1) in the knowledge of God, and of divine things. We must now "put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him," according to Paul, Coll. iii. 10. He hath certainly respect to the image in which man was created in the beginning: he saith that it consisted in knowledge he supposeth that this knowledge is obscured, and that the image of God is now become old, and that we must be again renewed after that same image. The first man was therefore not so simple and ignorant: for we must be renewed in knowledge after the image of that man: if he had been created in a childish ingorance,

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