THE P0WESTAND CONTESTS OF FLESH AND SPIRIT. 31D' indulgence of them, contrary to the forbidding law ofhis Creator. Now this proposed contest between flesh and spirit is ordained by God our Maker in infinite wisdom, to be a proper state of trial for us, inorder to future re- wards and punishments. 7. I might add, in the last place, another argument to prove that our flesh is the chief occasion of sin to the soul, from this consideration ; that the soul at first is tainted, corrupted, or defiled, with original sin, by its union to sinful flesh. You will immediately enquire, how is this possible, since the soul is a pure spiritual being, created immediately by God himself, and there- fore innocent and holy; and since it cannot touch, nor be touched, by anything corporeal, such as flesh and blood ? In what manner can the soul, though united to the body, receive any such sinful pollution,' or sinful impression, from the body? Take this account of it in short, in these few propo- sitions. 1. Though the spirit of man be incorporeal, and is created by God-without depraved or sinful qualities in it, yet it never exists, or comes into being, but as a part of human nature; and that not as a piece of new workman- ship, but as a part of mankind propagated from parents by the continued power of God's creating word ; " Be fruitful and multiply." When the infant-body of man is so far formed as to become fit forunion with a rational soul, the soul' comes into existence in union with the body, by the original law of creation, and becomes a part of the man, as much as the breath,: which is borrowed from the air, or the blood, which is made out of the food of the mother. 2. Thence it follows, that the soul is not to be judged of, -or Considered, as a single separate being, but as. in union with flesh and blood, as making up a compound creature of the human species. 3. Si ce in the very first moment of its being, by the . old and eneral rules or laws ofcreation andprovidence, it belon rs to a human body, derived from Adam, -,it is estéeme as propagated by the parents, and it becomes hereby a son or a daughter of fallen man, and is natu- rally, by the law of creation; involved in t e same cir- cumstance of ruin, .bas no claim to preserykg or recur-
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