him suffer and die. His anger was against man, and not against his Son; his claim was upon man, and not upon his Son; because the sin was man's, and not his Son's. His Son was sinned against; had no hand in the sin whatever; and the guilt can attach to him in no way whatever, being done against Him as much as against the Father: and whatever part he takes in the sinner's lot, and whatever he doth for the sinner's redemption, is of free will and sovereign grace, without obligation on his part, without desert on man's.

Concerning the Holy Ghost also, I believe that He is of the same substance with the Father and the Son, from whom he proceedeth as a Person from all eternity, forming the link of union between the Father and the Son, being the medium of their blessed communication; for ever pouring the fulness of the Father's love into the Son, so that the Father shall ever behold in him the completeness of his own being; and from the Son bearing back unto the Father his entire love, and willingness in all ways to do the Father's good pleasure. So that the Godhead in Itself not only possesseth all moral and spiritual perfections-such as love, and goodness, and bounty, and truth-but doth enjoy within Itself the exercise of the same anterior to all creation, which is but the utterance and expression of that which is already in God. Creation doth not add any thing to the affections and attributes of God, nor doth it make any change whatever in the relations of the Divine Persons to one another; it doth only bring their relations into outward and open manifestation, and make the creatures par. takers, to the extent of their fulness, of that enjoyment which God hath within himself. A God in Unity, without diversity of Persons, were incapable of moral affections-as of love and goodness-for there were nothing to love and bless : such a God must wait for a creation to bring alive and give exercise to such affections: but to make God beholden to any one save Himself, is to subvert God and therefore a God in Trinity subsisting, the God who is revealed to us in Jesus Christ, The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is really the only God of whom it is possible to conceive, as the Creator of moral beings, and the moral Governor of the world.

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II. Of the Christ of God, and God's Purpose in the Christ. The Holy Scriptures teach us, that before the foundation of the world God set up Christ to be his image and his fulness; in whom, by whom, and for whom, all things should be created and consist (1 Pet. i. 20; Col. i. 16-18); and through whom alone God should manifest and communicate himself to the creatures which should be made (John i. 18). It was proper for the Son to be this mediator, intervener, or intercessor between God and creation (1 Tim.ii.5); it was proper for the Father to purpose that he should be so, and to define the form in which he should

subsist, according to his own good pleasure (Heb. i. 1-4; ii. 6—11), which the Son dutifully and lovingly yieldeth himself to take, and for ever to sustain (Heb. x. 9-12); it was proper to the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, and so comprehending the purpose of the one and the submission of the other, to bring the eternal Son of the Father into the form of the Christ of God, and to maintain for ever the intercourse between God and the Christ, between the Father and the Son, now conformed to the Father's purpose (John xiv. 16, xv. 26, xx. 22; Luke i. 35; Matt. iii. 16; John iii. 34; Isai. xi. 2, xlii. 1, lxi. 1). Thus God's purpose, desire, and good-will is realized in the form of the Christ before the world was: creation, redemption, and the eternal state of all things, are but the unfoldings of that which was not only purposed by the Father, but seen in the Son, as realized by the Holy Ghost in the Christ, who is at once the fulness of Godhead and the beginning of the creation of God (Eph. i. passim ; Col. ii. 9; Rev. iii. 14). In him God saw his own image, and in him creation beholdeth its high original. And as the creatures came forth in their order by his workmanship, to represent, to enact, and to enjoy a part of his fulness (Col. i. 15-20); they were beloved by God, for his sake, with what love he loveth Christ his own Son: they were good and beautiful, because they were as God had foreseen and foreordained them in the Christ (Eph. i. 4, 5, ii. 10); and for them to rise up against Christ, is to rise up against their own life and beauty and stability, which have their being only in him, and to despise the love with which God loveth his own Son (John iii. 16-18, 35, 36). The love with which the elect are loved in Christ- "thou hast loved them as thou hast loved me " (John xvii.)-is not a new thing, but an old thing; is, in truth, no more than the record and the exemplification of that love with which God loved all his creatures, as they were seen in Christ, before the foundation of the world, and in him loved as the offspring of the Father's originating Word, and a part of the fulness contained in his dear Son. Now the end of God in all his working, is to bring this perfect image of himself and fulness of the Godhead into outward existence, that God may manifest toward the creatures, and the creatures towards God, the same affections which subsist between God and Christ (John xx. 17; Rom. viii. 14—17, 21, 29, 39; 2 Cor. v. 18 to end, vi. 18). It is not merely the realizing of a purpose which God hath in view in creation, but the revelation of that love which he hath to Christ (Matt. iii. 17; Luke ix. 35), because, though he was God, he did become the Christ; and likewise the receiving from the creatures, in their several places, the expression of the like dutifulness and submission which his own Son had shewn (Rom. vi. 11, 22). The infinite conde

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scension, dutifulness, and love of the Son, who, being very of very God, doth receive a life not self-existent, but ever dependent upon the Father, a Christ-life-that is, an anointed life-poured into him from above, with which he delighteth to serve God. This the Son did of his own free will, and God looks for the same in every creature who hath a will; it is the form and end of a will in creation to do, and to be for ever doing, that same thing. The will is created free, as the Son was free; in order that, like the Son, it may out of pure love to God continue the Son's self-denying act of becoming submissive unto the Father for evermore, to the end of receiving from the Father supplies of his own blessed Spirit for evermore. Thus a creature becometh a Christian; it sealeth itself of Christ by doing the Christ-act of selfsacrifice, in order to make manifest and enjoy an all-informing, all-blessing God. For this reason the Son of God is called the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, because he consented, and ever consenteth, to come out of his self-existence as a person in the Godhead, in order to receive a dependent life with whieh to become the servant of God. He ever slayeth himself, in order to be made alive again. And this great thing he doth in order to teach the law of self-denial and God-pleasing to those creatures who were to be made in the image of God, with a will the cause of itself. And in consequence of this doing of the Father's will, he receiveth that plenitude of all existence and blessedness which is comprehended in the word Christ, the Lordship of heaven and earth, the Headship of the world; is constituted the Wisdom of God," whom the Lord possessed in the beginning of his way before the works of old;" the Word of God, which was in the beginning with God, and which was God; the Word of Life; at once the Beginner and the beginning of the creation of God, at once the Creator of all things and the first-born of every creature: and all to teach and shew the free-born creatures that all honour and office in creation dependeth upon the voluntary submission of the will to the one absolute will of God. This setting up of the Christ by the persons of the Godhead is preliminary to creation, the first step and the last step of it; for, after all is perfected, all things shall stand together exactly according to that idea or form which before time they had in the Christ.

III. Of the Creation and Constitution of Man.

Man was created for two ends: the first, "to be an image and likeness of God;" the second, "to have dominion over the creatures." The former is descriptive of his reasonable soul, which is fashioned on very purpose to be an image of God, who is a Spirit; endowed with his affections of love and goodness, of truth and justice, of wisdom and understanding, &c.: so

that God without any accommodations should be able to speak his mind to man, and man without any conjecture should be able to understand it. In virtue of this conformity of human reason to the infinite Spirit of God, in virtue of man's soul being an image and likeness of God, God was able to converse and did converse with Adam in the garden of Eden, as afterwards he did with Abraham and Moses, and doth with us all in his word. For the word of God is not an accommodation, but a real utterance of God's mind to man's mind, created for the very purpose of understanding and responding to God. Reason is before revelation, a pre-requisite to revelation; and if revelation be God's account of himself, reason must find it to be the true account of herself. This conformity in all respects of human reason to God's infinite Spirit, makes it practicable for Christ, the fulness of Godhead, to be expressed in words which are the forms of reason, and to take a reasonable soul in which to contain the fulness of the Godhead, and by the powers of which to express the mind and will of God for ever to all the intelligent creation. To use the language of the schools, the Word of God is not a system of NOMINALIS M-that is, a set of names chosen for the best out of man's vocabulary, so as to give a kind of notion of God-but a system of REALISM, telling out the very thing which God is to the consonant mind of man. Now because there is in God perfect freedom, and no necessity nor causation of any kind, but He is what he is because He ever wills to be so, and is not forestalled by himself or any thing he hath made, but is ever free with the same measure of freedom; therefore it is required that there should be in man, his image, a will which should be uncaused, the cause of itself; not overmastered by God, but left to act in its own liberty. Also, because the will of God, which continueth absolute in the Father, hath consented in the Son, and doth ever consent, to come into the limits of the Christ, who is the fulness of the Father's purpose; so should there be in man, God's image, not only a will uncaused, the fountain of its own procedure, but likewise a continual energy and disposition therein to express itself in conformity with the will and purpose of God, as the same is made known in the Christ, who hath therefore the name The Word of God. Finally, as there is in God the Holy Ghost a continual willingness to serve Christ, in bringing to pass the will of the Father; so ought there to be in man a continual willingness to obey and do the will of God, and to bring it to pass within the full compass of his power.

Besides the uncaused will, therefore, there is in man the bounded reason, in the forms of which the will is ever bringing itself; and this reason in man is the proper representative of the Logos, or Word of God, into which the absolute will of God evermore poureth the fulness of its expression: and, besides the

reason, there is a body which obeyeth the reason, and carrieth into continual effect the reasonable determination of the will: and to his body all the creatures, both living and lifeless, were made subject the former receiving from his word their names, and the latter waiting for his hand to keep and dress them. Thus constituted in himself, and thus placed in the garden of Eden, he was the very image and likeness of the Christ of God, who, as the Second Person of the Godhead, hath Divine will; as the Word hath the bounds of the comprehensible, and containeth the names and orders of all created things within himself, and bringeth them into being by the word of his power, and by the same word sustaineth them there. This last office of the Christ, to bring forth from the womb of his fulness every creature of God, was represented by the creation of woman from man's substance, and their becoming the parents of infinite creatures, which was not an after-piece, but included in the very fiat of creation, or in the benediction passed upon his creation: "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Such is the condition of man, which the unchangeable God hath given him, which Christ hath redeemed and for ever fixed, which the Holy Ghost doth renew "after the image of him that created us," and for which every man is responsible, and according to which every man shall be judged. Revelation doth thus contemplate and address man as the image of God, and reproves him for the want of it: redemption hath removed out of the way that which let and hindered; and the calling of man is now, as it ever hath been, to be God-like, and to have dominion.

IV. Of Man's Transgression, and of Death its Penalty.

Our most bountiful and blessed Creator, having thus constituted us to be the image of himself in the Christ, did, to prove our entire consonance with Himself, commune with us freely and openly, face to face; walking and talking with us, and enjoying our society. And to shew the absolute sovereignty of our will, he made every thing upon the earth subservient to our word and work. And, now that we were like God by the will of our Creator, he required of us to be like God by our own will: the head of creation is required to act in creation as God had acted in order to creation. God, in order to creation, had, in the Second Person, surrendered up His own will, in order "to receive commandment from the Father;" and man, if he would be His image, must ever do the same. Having a free will, he must, out of this, in love and preference and worship of God, bring it into the condition of receiving and observing com