closely and anxiously walk in the simple ways of holy living as they have the Apostles and saints of God for an ensample.

And may God's Holy Spirit enable you to lay to heart, and keep these rules to your salvation and His glory.

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SERMON XIII.

ORIGINAL SIN.

ROM. V. 12.

"By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin."

It has been a complaint commonly made by thoughtful men in all ages of the world, that vice and guilt are much more easy, natural, and frequent than virtue and goodness. This disposition towards evil has been often observed and lamented, but no person ever understood how it originated, how far it extended, or how it was to be cured, till the Holy Scriptures of God gave him that knowledge.

The Bible however does not merely explain these most interesting and important points, but also builds a great deal upon them. For the whole Revelation of Christ in the New Testament, inasmuch as it is the revelation of a mode of pardon to the guilty, and acceptance of the outcast, requires the doctrines of human sin and guilt as its foundation.

I shall endeavour with God's assistance to lay before you the doctrine of the Church of Christ, as proved and supported by Holy Scripture, on an important part of this subject, viz. the original state of sin in which men are born into the world. The knowledge of this doctrine is important to the full understanding of the scheme of redemption. The doctrine is important also, because many men have a great distaste to it, and presume to doubt how far it is compatible with the justice of God, or His mercy; while others question how far it is certainly revealed in Holy Scripture.

If we go to the Holy Volume for our information on this important subject, we naturally turn first to the book of Genesis; expecting that the narrative of the fall of man, from whence all such infection of our nature arises, will enable us to form some accurate idea of it.

After the sin of Adam and Eve, recorded in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis, the sentence of God is thus pronounced upon them and their tempter. "And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life; and I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed, and her seed; It shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel. Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow

shalt thou bring forth children; and thy desire shalt be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam He said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee, and thou shalt eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'

In this curse so awfully pronounced against the progenitors of the human race, we find the doom of sorrow, toil, and death most distinctly proclaimed. But narrated in the simple manner usual with the writers in Holy Scripture, it contains no mention whatever of the propagation of these judgments upon the posterity of Adam and Eve. They indeed, by sinning, had introduced sin into the world; but the doom imposed upon them is stated in language strictly personal to themselves. Indeed so strictly personal to themselves is the language, that some parts of the curse are addressed expressly to Adam, and some to Eve; as though the labour of toil, and the sorrow in eating the fruits of the earth, and the returning to the dust from whence she came, were to be understood as parts of the curse from which the woman was to be exempt.

We must therefore look to other parts of the Bible

for the interpretation of Adam's sin and sentence as they respect his descendants.

The narrative of the book of Genesis, from the fall to the flood, is very short. The whole history of so many centuries is comprised in three short chapters; but those three chapters supply a striking comment on the continuity of the curse as denounced to Adam and Eve. The first event that follows the expulsion of the first pair from Paradise is the birth of Cain, and the second the murder of Abel. Thus the first few verses of the next chapter declare that sin, and with sin death, were already the inheritance of the sons of Adam. The next chapter is occupied with a record of mortality, a list of those who from Adam to Noah suffered one of the consequences of Adam's sin. In the following chapter the state of the world in respect of sin is thus described: "The Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh. And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him at the heart. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth' was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth and behold it was

corrupt; for all

flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me for the earth is filled with violence