QUESTION III. 295 honoured the law of God with obedience during all his state of trial, man wouldhave acquired some advances in the knowledge of God, some improvement of his nature, and greater resem- blance to God, by a more intimate acquaintance and converse , with God in his various perfections and works, and some stronger bias to the love of God and to all holiness, which in itself would have been a natural increase of his happiness. Nor is it to be supposed, that the blessed God- would have presently contra- dicted the nature of things, and that connexion. of causes and effects which his own wisdom had just established, that is, the connexion of holiness and happiness: Nor can we imagine that he would .'.rave forbid the soul of man to be immortal, contrary to its very nature, in order to have put an end to the life and hap- piness of so holy and so obedient a creature; God always loves holiness so much, that he will reward it where he finds it. And if man with this improvement of his nature had continued im- mortal, his happiness had been still greater, and that with- out end. 3. God bath wrought into the nature of man an earnest desire after life or immortality, and also a desire of a perpetual change or novelty of pleasures, and that without the diminution of them. The nature of man would be tired with one everlast- ing round of the mere repetition of sensible delights, of eating, drinking, sleeping, working, &c. or even of the more refined delights of the mind, if there were no novelty, DO fresh scenes of pleasure to open upon him ; and yet man could never desirenew pleasures should be less than those he enjoyedbefore. Now since God bath tvrought this appetite or desire of immortality, and- of fresh delights into the very nature of man, it is highly probable that God who makes nothing in vain, would have raised or tran- slated him to some scenes of higher felicity, and thus gratified this desire which himself had wrought in his innocent creature, after man had paid him so much actual honour and obedience in his state of trial. 4. I might borrow another argument from scripture and the tree of life, which in the New Testament is made a figure of the advanced happiness of heaven, and the joys which the saints shall possess there. Now though it be not expressly revealed- at large in so short a history as the third of Genesis, that a blessed immortality should be the rewardof Adam's obedience, yet there is much reason to suppose that the tree of life could not properly have been any embletp or figure of eternal life under the cove- nant cf grace, if it had not been an emblem, sign, seal, or pledge of this covenant of works 'and of this promise which should have made Adam immortal, and unchangeably happy ; and that probably in the same way as the tree of knowledge of goad andevil was made a sign and pledge of the evil that should
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