and particularly of the love of God as our Father, and as the God and Father of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. We see our duty in the utmost extent, and the most cogent reasons to perform it: We have eternity opened to us, even an endless state of honor and felicity, the reward of virtuous actions, and the Spirit of God promised for our direction and assistance. And all this may and ought to be applied to the purifying our minds, and the perfecting of holiness. And to those happy advantages we are born, for which we are bound for ever to praise and magnify the rich grace of God in the Redeemer." And he elsewhere says, "The gospel constitution is a scheme the most perfect and effectual for restoring true religion, and promoting virtue and happiness, that ever the world has yet seen." And† admirably adapted to enlighten our minds, and sanctify our hearts; And never were motives so divine and powerful proposed, to induce us to the prac tice of all virtue and goodness.

*

And yet even these means have been ineffectual upon the far greater part of them with whom they have been used; of the many that have been called, few have been chosen.

As to the Jews, God's ancient people, with whom they were used in the first place, and used long by Christ and his apostles, the generality of them rejected Christ and his gospel, with extreme pertinaciousness of spirit. They not only went on still in that career of corruption which had been increasing from the time of the Maccabees; but Christ's coming, and his doctrine and miracles, and the preaching of his followers, and the glorious things that attended the same, were the occasion, through their perverse misimprovement, of an infinite increase of their wickedness. They crucified the Lord of Glory with the utmost malice and cruelty, and persecuted his followers; they pleased not God, and were contrary to all men; and went on to grow worse and worse, till they filled up the measure of their sin, and wrath came upon them to the uttermost; and they were destroyed, and

* Key. § 167. + Note on Rom. i. 16. Pref. to Par, on Rom. pages 145, 47.

cast out of God's sight, with unspeakably greater tokens of the divine abhorrence and indignation, than in the days of Nebuchadnezzar. The bigger part of the whole nation were slain, and the rest were scattered abroad through the earth, in the most abject and forlorn circumstances. And in the same spirit of unbelief and malice against Christ and the gospel, and in their miserable, dispersed circumstances, do they remain to this day.

And as to the Gentile nations, though there was a glorious success of the gospel amongst them in the apostles' days, yet probably not one in ten of those that had the gospel preached to them, embraced it. The powers of the world were set against it, and persecuted it with insatiable malignity. And among the professors of Christianity, there presently appeared in many a disposition to corruption, and to abuse the gospel unto the service of pride and licentiousness. And the apostles, in their days, foretold a grand apostasy of the Christian world, which should continue many ages, and observed that there appeared a disposition to such an apostasy, among professing Christians, even in that day, 2 Thess. ii. 7. And the greater part of the ages which have now elapsed, have been spent in the duration of that grand and general apostasy, under which the Christian world, as it is called, has been transformed into that which has been vastly more deformed, more dishonorable and hateful to God, and repugnant to true virtue, than the state of the Heathen world before; which is agreeable to the prophetical descriptions given of it by the Holy Spirit.

In these latter ages of the Christian church, God has raised up a great number of great and good men, to bear testimony against the corruptions of the church of Rome, and by their means introduced that light into the world, by which, in a short time, at least one third part of Europe was delivered from the more gross enormities of Antichrist; which was attended at first with a great reformation as to vital and practical religion. But how is the gold soon become dim! To what a pass are things come in Protestant countries at this day, and in our nation in particular! To

what a prodigious height has a deluge of infidelity, profaneness, luxury, debauchery and wickedness of every kind, arisen! The poor savage Americans are mere babes and fools, (if I may so speak) as to proficiency in wickedness, in comparison of multitudes that the Christian world throngs with. Dr. Taylor himself, as was before observed, represents that the generality of Christians have been the most wicked, lewd, bloody, and treacherous of all mankind; and says, (Key, § 388) "The wickedness of the Christian world renders it so much like the Heathen, that the good effects of our change to Christianity are but little seen."

And with respect to the dreadful corruption of the present day, it is to be considered, besides the advantages already mentioned, that great advances in learning and philosophic knowledge have been made in the present and past century, giving great advantage for a proper and enlarged exercise of our rational powers, and for our seeing the bright manifestation of God's perfections in his works. And it is to be observed, that the means and inducements to virtue, which this age enjoys, are in addition to most of those which were mentioned before as given of old, and among other things, in addition to the shortening of man's life to seventy or eighty years, from near a thousand. And with regard to this, I would observe, that as the case now is in Christendom, take one with another of them that ever come to years of discretion, their life is not more than forty or fortyfive years; which is but about the twentieth part of what it once was; and not so much in great cities, places where profaneness, sensuality and debauchery commonly prevail to the greatest degree.

Dr. Taylor, (Key, § 1) truly observes, that God has, from the beginning, exercised wonderful and infinite wisdom, in the methods he has, from age to age, made use of to oppose vice, cure corruption, and promote virtue in the world, and introduced several schemes to that end. It is indeed remarkable, how many schemes and methods were tried of old, both before and after the flood; how many were used in the times of the Old Testament, both with Jews and Heathens, and how ineffectual all these ancient methods proved for four hundred

years together, till God introduced that grand dispensation for the redeeming men from all iniquity, and purifying them to himself, a people zealous of good works, which the scripture represents as the subject of the admiration of angels. But even this has now so long proved ineffectual with respect to the generality, that Dr. Taylor thinks there is need of a new dispensation; the present light of the gospel being insufficient for the full reformation of the Christian world, by reason of its corruptions; (Note on Rom. i. 27) and yet all these things, according to him, without any natural bias to the contrary; no stream of natural inclination or propensity at all, to oppose inducements to goodness; no native opposition of heart, to withstand those gracious means, which God has ever used with mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, any more than there was in the heart of Adam, the moment God created him in perfect innocence.

Surely Dr. Taylor's scheme is attended with strange paradoxes! And that his mysterious tenets may appear in a true light, it must be observed, at the same time while he supposes these means, even the very greatest and best of them, to have proved so ineffectual, that help from them, as to any general reformation, is to be despaired of; yet he maintains that all mankind, even the Heathen in all parts of the world, yea, every single person in it, (which must include every Indian in America, before the Europeans came hither; and every inhabitant of the unknown parts of Africa and Terra Australis) has ability, light and means sufficient to do their whole duty; yea, (as many passages in his writings plainly suppose) to perform perfect obedience to God's law, without the least degree of vice or iniquity.

But I must not omit to observe....Dr. Taylor supposes that the reason why the gospel dispensation has been so ineffectual, is, that it has been greatly misunderstood and perverted. In Key, 389, he says, "Wrong representations of the scheme of the gospel have greatly obscured the glory of divine grace, and contributed much to the corruption of its pro

fessors. Such doctrines have been almost universally taught and received, as quite subvert it. Mistaken notions about nature, grace, election and reprobation, justification, regeneration, redemption, calling, adoption, &c. have quite taken away the very ground of the Christian life"

But how came the gospel to be so universally and exceedingly misunderstood? Is it because it is in itself so very dark and unintelligible, and not adapted to the apprehension of the human faculties? If so, how is the possession of such an obscure and unintelligible thing, so unspeakable and glori ous an advantage? Or is it because of the native blindness, corruption and superstition of mankind? But this is giving up the thing in question, and allowing a great depravity of nature. And Dr. Taylor speaks of the gospel as far otherwise than dark and unintelligible; he represents it as exhibiting the clearest and most glorious light, to deliver the world from darkness, and bring them into marvellous light. He speaks of the light which the Jews had, under the Mosaic dispensation, as vastly exceeding the light of nature, which the Heathen enjoyed: And yet he supposes that even the latter was so clear as to be sufficient to lead men to the knowledge of God, and their whole duty to him. And he speaks of the light of the gospel as vastly exceeding the light of the Old Testament. He says of the Apostle Paul in particular, "That he wrote with great perspicuity; that he takes great care to explain every part of his subject; that he has left no part of it unexplained and unguarded, and that never was an author more exact and cautious in this."* Is it not strange, therefore, that the Christian world, without any native depravity to prejudice and darken their minds, should be so blind in the midst of such glaring light, as to be all, or the generality, agreed, from age to age, so essentially to misunderstand that which is made so very plain ?

Dr. Taylor says, p. 167, S. " It is my persuasion that the Christian religion was very early and grievously corrupted,

* Pref. to Par, on Rom. p. 146, 48.