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ing? Therefore I say, that all reasoning, both of the á priori, or á posteriori kind; that is, from the laws of human reason, or the observation of outward things; is, when applied to the purpose of God, but one method, which is the examination of the works of God. For a word of God is only the purpose of a work proceeding from the Son, who precedeth in his office the act of the Spirit, which bringeth that word into work. Be it so then: and, in order to shew the purpose of God to be what we have stated above, we shall undertake to examine the various demonstrations which God hath made from the beginning of his design in all things which he hath created and done. For to the attainment of the purpose or ultimate end of God in creation, there are many steps, or, as they are called in Scripture, ages, wherein dawned, and more perfectly dawned, into the light of day, the mystery of Christ, which from the beginning of the world had been hid in God. These successive openings of the Divine purpose, and manifestations of the Divine work which was laid in Christ before the world was, we shall examine; in order that we may discover what was the mind of God from the beginning, and what is to be the accomplishment of God through everlasting ages;-a high and holy undertaking, which the Holy Ghost alone enlightening my mind to apprehend, and circumcising my lips to utter, will bring forth with success. Yet, high and holy though it be, I believe it to be contained in the revelation of God, and therefore within the sphere of the apprehension of faith; and therefore likewise within the appointed sphere of the man of God, who speaketh from faith to faith. And now I pray that thou, Father, who art, who wast, and who art to come; and thou Jesus, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever; and thou, all-seeing Spirit of Truth, which doth testify of the Father and the Son, wouldest grant unto me a double portion of the grace which belongeth to this my office as a minister of the truth, and fill me with the Spirit of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, to think and speak aright of all thy works.

The first act of creation, concerning which we must speak a little for the completeness of our subject; and only a little, forasmuch as, though admitted and held in all the churches, it is expressed in none, as a fundamental article of the one faith; is the creation of the invisible hosts in their various orders, concerning whom it is written (Col. i. 16): "that they were made by him, and for him.. in whom we have redemption through his blood..who is the first-born from the dead;" that is, by the Son of God in his predestinated form of God-man; for in this form only of the Christ, have we redemption through his blood, is he the first-begotten from the dead. This shews us already what we shall find to be the sum and substance of all our discourse; namely, that the Godhead had purposed the Christ, or the Son, to

subsist in human form, before he purposed any thing else; and that for him, and by him, in that subsistency, already and always present in the Divine mind, though not yet manifested to the creatures, God did create things invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions, or principalities or powers. Seeing, therefore, the invisible hosts and spiritualities in heavenly places were made for Christ; and, to shadow forth a part of that Being of beings who is the fulness of the Godhead in a body; it doth necessarily follow, that whatever was acted out in that first creation must be for the end of accomplishing the great purpose of God, concerning the manifestations of his Son: and to this agreeth all the information of Scripture, both concerning those which stood and concerning those which fell, of whom the former are called elect; that is, chosen in Christ, and by Him sustained against that infirmity which is inseparable from the creature; and the latter are reserved until the judgment of the great day, to receive sentence from Christ, and through eternity to dwell with reprobate men in the lake that burneth, which is the second death. But if they are to bejudged by Christ, and, ever since they kept not their first estate, have been unto that judgment reserved, then must they have committed sin against the Christ; or, which is the same thing, against the law of their being, and the boundary of their habitation; for in Christ all things have their constitution (Col. i. 17). Be it so then acknowledged, that the angels, fallen and unfallen, were created for Christ, in him stood by election, and out of him, fell, and against him sinned by the wickedness which, without an outward cause or occasion, this first form of creature bred within itself: and we now proceed into the second and great act of creation, which is the creation of Adam, and of the earth, and of the things visible; and especially of Adam the head and possessor of the visible, a new act of the revelation of the mystery of the Divine purpose, and another step towards the attainment of the great end of God, which, we have undertaken to prove, is the bringing in of the Christ, and the establishment of Him as the Head of all things visible and invisible.

The creation of Adam hath this advancement, above the creation of angels, that it includeth another kind of existence, another substance, and another exponent of the Divine Mind and purpose, which is the visible, as distinguished from the invisible; the corporeal, as distinguished from the incorporeal; matter, as distinguished from spirit. Hitherto there had only been invisible and incorporeal substance, such as is the soul of man ; but now there is to be joined therewith a body which shall possess all material and visible things as its habitation. That matter existed before Adam there can be no dispute, seeing his body was formed out of the dust of the ground; and if it existed ever

so short a time before him, it may have existed ever so long a time. But that it was created of God for a possession unto man, and that till man was made it was an unpossessed, unmastered, unenjoyed substance, I most certainly believe; because, till Adam, there was no creature capable of knowing it, or of receiving impressions from it. The other intelligences already existing, being pure, unclothed, insensible spirits, had no need of a material world to the completeness of their being; and so there was no subject for matter to act upon until intelligence was lodged in a material body; and without an intelligent subject, as well as an intelligible object, there can be no knowledge, enjoyment, use, or end of God attained. And therefore it is that the creation of matter out of nothing;-or, as Paul expresseth it, the framing by the word of God of the worlds, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear (Heb. xi. 4);-the creation of the heavens and the earth, as they are set forth in the first chapter of Genesis, from their being a deep, without form and void, until they came into their present harmony of earth, and sun, and moon, and stars, is no more than the cradle, and the clothing, and the food, and the other apparatus for the creation of Adam, who was made to possess them all; and therein stood he the type of the Second Adam, the God in man, who shall possess them all for ever and ever: and whether those six days, or dawnings, unto Adam's birth, be years or centuries, or millenniums, or very days, is a question that answereth no end, seeing there was as yet no being created under the conditions of space and time, which pertain not to an invisible spirit, but to the embodied soul of man. And as to all manner of speculations about the inhabitants of the sun, and moon, and stars, I consider them to be as idle and fanciful as the speculations of the middle ages, concerning the number of angels which could occupy a point of space. That they are prepared for the habitation and possession of corporeal intelligencies, like man, I do believe; but that there are in existence at present any such corporeal intelligencies, I do not believe, because I have no ground of reason or of revelation for believing so: but I believe that the Son of man is Lord of them all, and shall people them all in his own time with material creatures, holding of the type, and standing under the dominion, of the First-born from the dead, and the church of the First-born. This earth being, as it were, the remote and solitary valley, wherein the sons of the kings, the princes of the royal blood, are rearing up for the government and possession of the kingdom; for the dominion of that visible, material substance of heaven and earth, which was made for man, and by man shall be possessed. But into these matters I am unwillingly drawn aside by the idleness and wickedness of our physical sceptics, and sentimental

divines; and do gladly return to take up the subject of Adam's creation, and Adam's estate before he fell.

Concerning his creation, it is said, "Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea," &c. This, the fiat of his being, divideth itself into two parts: first, his constitution as a creature; and secondly, his dominion over the creatures. Concerning his constitution as a creature it is said in this place, Gen. i. 26, that he was made in God's image, and after God's likeness, which I would explain by the help of two passages in the New Testament, the one Rom. v. 14, where it is written, "Adam who is the figure of Him that was to come; " literally, " Adam who is type of Him that is about to be;" not that has been, or that was to be, but that is to be. As it is elsewhere said, "the age to come, the world to come, the wrath to come;" so, by the same Greek words, is it here said that Adam is type of Christ that is to come. The other passage is in 2 Cor. xv. 45, where it is said, "The first man Adam was made a living soul, the last Adam a quickening" or life-giving "Spirit." This passage appropriates the very name of Adam unto Christ; not while he was in suffering flesh, but after that he had received the promise of the Holy Spirit, and begun to give Him for the building up of the church his bride. For it is a capital point, and common place of theology, that, notwithstanding the acts of power which Christ did in the flesh by the Holy Spirit that was in him without measure, he did not become the dispenser of the Spirit unto others, he did not baptize with the Spirit until he rose from the dead; and, therefore, the name of Adam doth not become appropriate to him till then and herein consisteth the Apostle's contrast between the living soul and the life-giving Spirit; Adam being of that natural (psychical or soulal) order of being, which, in the second chapter of this same Epistle, is declared incapable of receiving the things of the Spirit of God; but Christ being not only himself of the spiritual order, but the propagator of that new degree of beings raised again, and which is the fallen soul possessed by the Holy Spirit, the creature heretofore out of God brought into union with God through the two-fold nature of the Son constituting him Head, and the indwelling of the Spirit constituting the creatures members of his flesh and of his bones, that is, of his redeemed humanity. Which dignity of being the Father of a new order of the creatures became Christ's when he arose from the dead, and by the Spirit begat sons unto God ; which agreeth with what went before, that Adam is the type of Him that is to be. This becometh still more manifest from considering the forty-seventh verse of the same fifteenth chapter: "The first man is of the earth, earthy; the Second Man is the Lord from heaven." Here Christ is called the Second Man, in

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virtue of his being the Lord from heaven; which distinctly pointeth to his Second Advent, when (Acts i. 11) " He shall come from heaven in like manner as he ascended into heaven." Besides, both Peter, in the second chapter of the Acts, and Paul in the second chapter of Philippians, as well as in the first chapter of Ephesians, and I may say in every other place, make his lordship consequent upon his resurrection, as if his resurrection from the bowels of the earth was the true act of the manifestation or birth of the Second Man; which truly it was, forasmuch as no son of man is arrived at his proper dignity of Adam's first estate, or rather that estate of which this was typical, nor doth attain to it, until the resurrection. The gift of the Holy Spirit unto the fallen creature being the act of its generation out of death into life; the action of the Holy Spirit, in and under the flesh, being the struggles of the creature for its liberty; and the resurrection being its redemption and adoption into the sonship of God; wherefore it is written: "We who have the first fruits of the Spirit do groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption; to wit, the redemption of the body." Wherefore also, in all the Prophets, and in the Gospels, and in the Epistles also, the resurrection is always figured by a woman in travail, or the earth in travail; and on this account Christ is called "The First-born from the dead: the First-begotten from the dead:" who completing thereby the form of the unfallen Adam, arising out of the form of the fallen Adam, becometh verily, the Second Man, and shall be manifested the Second Man when he descends as the Lord from heaven; and therefore, by Daniel, when seen coming in the clouds of Heaven, he is called the Son of Man; which name he oft useth of himself, as characteristic of him, in his Second Advent: "When the Son of Man shall come," &c. So much interpretation doth the New Testament contain, with respect to the purpose of God, in the creation of Adam, as the type of Him that is to come. Resting then upon this as a word of the Holy Ghost, and that a very remarkable word; forasmuch as, though Moses is called a prophet like unto Christ, and Melchizedec a priest like unto Christ, Adam alone is called a type of the Christ: Adam alone of all the men who have lived is declared to be the type or impression of Him who is to be manifested in the age to come;-taking, I say, the guidance of this word of God, we shall endeavour to explain the constitution of Adam, described by these words, "Made in our image, after our likeness."

It is written in the Scriptures, that" Christ is the first-born of every creature" (Col. i. 15); "the beginning of the creation of God" (Rev. iii. 14); and under the name of "Wisdom " which he appropriates to himself (Luke vii. 35), and Paul appropriates for him (1 Cor. i. 24), he is declared (Prov. viii. 23)

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