bliss where the spirits of just men made perfect are admitted immediately on their separation from the body. The prophet Isaiah leads us to believe that Eden, the country of Eden, was the most fertile and delightful spot on the whole earth: how delightful, then, must the most delightful part of it, the garden of Eden, have been! "the garden of the Lord;"* "the wilderness of sweets;"" and, without thorn, the rose." Here was every thing to please the fancy, to delight the eye, and to gratify the taste; and here, amidst and beneath refreshing and scarcely penetrable shades, Adam was wont to hear the voice of his great Creator, to enjoy his smiles, and to taste the sweets of fellowship and communion with him. This happy state, and delightful place, cannot be described; but the prince of English poets, and one of our great divines, has summed all up in these expressive words"Enormous bliss!"

* Isaiah 51.

There are who deny that we all sinned in Adam, and who are bold enough to say, that it is unjust in God to inflict on his posterity the punishment that was due to the first father's crime. But would these persons have had any objection to have enjoyed the blessings that were entailed on the posterity, if the progenitor had fulfilled the conditions of the first covenant? What right or title would any of the human race have had to the high privileges of a state of innocence, even of immortality itself, but on the ground of Adam's obedience? They would have enjoyed all the benefits, had he continued upright, without any respect to their own obedience: to suffer the punishment, then, on the same reasoning, is just and equal; for "shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" Paul does not scruple to affirm, that "by one man's disobedience many were made sinners;" and Jeremiah says-" The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked."

- From this fruitful source proceed all the sins of the heart, of the lip, and of the life; and the evil of it far exceeds all our conceptions "Who can know it?" The Church of England, in one of her articles, defines it thus: "Original sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk,) but it is the fault and corruption of the nature of every man that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world it deserveth God's wrath and damnation." And the Scriptures declare, that by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin,* "in whom all have sinned." Sin has made such dreadful havoc on the human race, that there is in every natural man a

* Romans 3.

positive privation of all that is good, and a propensity to all that is evil. Sin hath marred the whole of this lower creation; and even angels, those who kept not their first estate, felt its malign influence, and are now suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. The best definition of sin is given in these words: "Sin is a transgression of the law;" and there is a far greater evil in sin than in damnation itself-the one being the cause, and the other only the effect: and all are sinners in the general; and every one, in particular, has his own way of sinning against God. "We have turned every one," says the prophet, "to his own way." The word sinner is used in Scripture no less than twenty times, and in the plural (sinners) nearly forty. It appears to be man's trade to sin; for words of the same termination are used to express the occupation or trade of men in particular: thus it seems by this word, sinner, that we are dealers in sin, and are all, without excep

tion, "of the same craft," and, "by occupation," sinners.

The apostle has given us the true picture of the sinner, which he borrowed from the royal psalmist "There is none righteous, no not one; there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no not one. Their throat is an open sepulchre: with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways: and the way of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes." Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them that are under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. Therefore Paul, like a sound logician, draws