INTRODUCTION. 285 all his will. In short, either the new created man loved God supremely, or not : If he did not, hewas not innocent, since the law and light of nature requires such a supreme love to God. If he did love God supremely, then he stood disposed and ready for every act of adoration and obedience ; and this is true holi- ness of heart. And, indeed, without this how could a God of holiness love the work of his own hands ? There must also in this creature be found a regular subjec- tion of the inferior powers to the superior ; sense and appetite and passion must be subject to reason, that is, the mind and con- science must have a power and readiness to govern these lower faculties, and keep them in due obedience, that he might not, offend against the law of his creation, and his will must be in- clined to its. - He misst also have his heart inlaid with love and good-will to the creatures, and especially those of his own spe- cies, if he shouldbe placed among them ; and he must be endued with a principle of honesty and truth in dealing with them. And if many of these creatures were made at once, there should be nodomineering pride, no malice, no envy, no falsehood, no brawls or contentions among them ; but all harmony and love, each seeking the welfare and happiness of his fellow-creaturesas well as his own. This principle of universal righteousness and holiness, I take to be the noblest part of that image of God, that is, his moral image, in which Moses the Jewish historian represents man to be at first created, and which I think was due to his nature from a God of equity and goodness. And the same writer assures us, when God surveyed all his works, at the end of his creation, he pronounced, themall very good. And Solo- mon the wisest of men, in his book of Ecclesiastes, assures us, that God made man upright; Eccl. vii. 29. It is granted that the natural image of God in which man was created, consisted partly in his spiritual, intelligent and immortal nature, and the various faculties thereof; and his political image, if I may so express it, consisted in his being made lord and governor over all the lower creation : But when we speak of this part of the divine image which is moral, we are assured by Paul, that it was the rectitude of his nature, or his conformity to thewill and law of God. Paul was once a Jewish pharisee, and well under- stood the sense of Moses, and in his epistle to the Ephesians, iv. 24. he says, that the image of God, intowhich man is to be a: Surely, if the soul or will of this new made creature had not a real pro- pensity to love and obey God who is a spirit, but was merely formed with a natural capacity or power to do no, in a state of indifference to good or evil; then his being put into such a union with flesh and blood among a thousand animal temp- tations, would have been an over balance on the aide of sensuality And vice : But our reason can never suppose that God the wise, just and good, would bare placed a new made creature in such an original situation.
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