universally in corrupting the first article of religion; if every breath carried the infection, and every heart so easily received it, the dishonour is rather extenuated than aggravated, by supposing the seeds of the distemper to be latent in the constitution. That the Gentiles before the preaching of the gospel were alienated from the life of God through the IGNORANCE that was in them*, and that the Jews were perpetually falling into the like apostasy, even against the remonstrances of their better knowledge, is a fact sufficient to explain and justify this part of our subject.

But the ignorance of the mind is farther aggravated and confirmed by its inattention-there is none that seeketh after God. The affections of man are engaged by other things: he that is of the earth is earthly, and speaketh of the earth. Honour, wealth, and pleasure are the objects

* Eph. iv. 18. Here I would refer my reader to the Works of Mr. Leland, vol. I. p. 406. On the Advantage and Necessity of the Christian Revelation; wherein he shews, that the representations of the deplorable state of the Gentiles, made to us in the scripture, are literally true, and agreeable to fact; and are confirmed by the undoubted monu. ments of Paganism. And also that the attempts of some moderns to explain away those representations are vain and insufficient. The design of the work is good; and it is executed with learning and perspicuity.

As attention: they furnish him with the matter of his conversation, and his thoughts are so completely filled with the means of obtaining them, that the great subjects of the other world are excluded. Tell him of any thing that concerns him as a man of this world, and he is at leisure to hear you; but if you speak of what is infinitely more important, and concerns him more nearly, you find him preengaged. When St. Paul discoursed to the wise men of Athens, on the living God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the resurrection of the dead, and a future judgment; how indifferent did these great things appear to them, and with what coldness were they received!Well might the prophet say, that when God should be made known to the heathens, he should be found of them that sought him not.Had they been seeking after the Creator, and in love with truth, they would have rejoiced at the sight of such a messenger, who was capable of giving them all the satisfaction they could desire: but instead of this, some mocked, others accused him as a setter forth of strange gods ; some despised him as a babbler, others said, they would hear him again at another time. So true is it, that the natural man, or man as he is in himself without the aid of divine grace, receiveth

ceiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him. His wisdom, like himself, is earthly; and wherever it prevails, the wisdom of God is either tasteless or disagreeable. The wise men of Athens were no worse than other wise men of this world: the same carnal mind which possessed them, whether it be in the Jew or the Greek, in the ancient or the modern, will always be productive of the like stupidity.

Ignorance of God, and disaffection to the things of heaven, so manifest in all men while they are in a state of nature, are strong proofs of our original corruption; to which the Apostle adds that strange propensity to error in opinion, which led mankind into the abominable errors of idolatry. These seem to have been chiefly alluded to, in the words which follow in the order of his description of human nature--they are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable, there is none that doeth good, no not one. The sense of this hath partly been considered before; for though the words may signify indefinitely any departure from the way of truth and holiness, yet we hear not of any species of apostasy which became general, except that of idolatry; concerning which, much hath occurred to us already. Yet I have

some further observations to make upon it. If we look back for the beginning of this crime of going out of the way, we shall find that it happened in Paradise; where God by immediate revelation taught a right way to Adam, and called it the way of the tree of life; a way which would have guided him to the perfection of his nature in the enjoyment of God, the source of life and felicity. But from this way he turned aside, when he applied to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for wisdom and exaltation independent of his Creator. His posterity have been engaged in a search equally fruitless and dangerous, as often as they have consulted their own will and followed their own way; seeking death in the error of their life; not by design, for death cannot be an object of choice, but by necessary consequence, through blindness and disaffection. For the prophet hath informed us, that the way of man is not in himself: when he hath lost that way into which he was directed by the Author of his being, his own sagacity never can bring him back to it again; but the farther he proceeds, the greater is his deviation. The wise man tells us, there is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

*Wisd. i. 12.

death*. How miserable is this, that the way which leads to death should seem to be a right one! But such is the fact: every way which leads from the true God and the true religion must terminate in death, notwithstanding all the fine things that may be said in commendation of it. The experiment has been made on various occasions, and always with the same success. The Serpent recommended a way, as better than that which God had revealed; but it proved to be a way of death, and all the children of Adam are witnesses of the issue. When the generation of men before the flood departed from God, or, as the Scripture itself expresses it, when all flesh corrupted his way upon the eartht, death and destruction soon ensued; every thing that was in the earth died; except those few who escaped by virtue of the divine covenant of mercy. When God brought a people out of Egypt for his service, they turned aside out of the way which he commanded them, and some met death immediately from the sword, others more remotely, at the end of their wanderings in the wilderness. Having turned aside from the right way of faith and obedience, they were punished by being made to wander out of the way; and even to die in

this

* Prov. xiv. 12. † Gen. vi. 12, 17. + Exod. xxxii. 8.