18 must take my rise from our Saviour's rejoinder to that former saucy reply, ver. 34: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin &c. The forecited sentence of Cyprian doth here again opportunely interpose itself: Ut Deum cognoscas, teipsum prius ccgnosce—“ That thou mayest know God aright, first learn to know thyself." The advice is as true and fitting to our present purpose, Ut Christum cognoscas, teipsum prius cognosce: There is no better way or method to know Christ as he is in special our Lord God and Redeemer, than by knowing or understanding ourselves to be servants, and wherein that servitude consists from which we are redeemed. That we are by nature servants unto sin, you will require no further proof, nor can there any other be found better than our Saviour's own authority: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. The assertion is emphatical, and as peremptory as plain. But concerning the extent or limitation of it, there may be some question made, or scruple cast in, by the ordinary hearer or reader. For seeing—as Solomon long ago hath taught us ex cathedra-there is no man that sinneth not; and our apostle to like purpose, If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us; then, if it be universally true which our Saviour here saith, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin, the very redeemed of the Lord, the best of his saints here on earth, may seem concluded to be servants to sin ; seeing he that sinneth doth commit sin. The argument is somewhat captious, and would be stronger, if to commit sin were a verb of the present tense, and were to be no further extended. But the word in the original is not a verb, but a participle of the present tense, πᾶς ὁ ποιῶν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν, not πᾶς ὃς ποιεῖ τὴν ἁμαρτίαν: and participles of that form (as every young student in the Greek tongue, ecclesiastic especially, well knows) are according to Hebraisms most frequent in the Greek Testament fully equivalent to Latin verbals. Vinum appetere, that is, to call for a cup of wine, any ordinary man may without impeachment to his sobriety, or censure of temulency; but to be homo appetens vini, is in the Latin tongue a full character or expression of a winebibber, or a drunkard. So that πᾶς ὁ ποιῶν τὴν ἁμαρτίαν is as much as if he had said in Latin, operarius iniquitatis, which is the best expression of the Hebrew ps by. Not every one that committeth a sin, or more sins than one, but every one that is a committer of sin, or a worker of iniquity, is the servant of sin. And such all of us are by nature, and so continue until we be redeemed by the free grace of Christ from the dominion of sin and tyranny of Satan. But before we can come to know the manner how we are made free by the Son of God, we must (as it hath been intimated before) first know wherein our servitude to sin doth consist. And this we cannot well know without some prenotion, or description at least, of the properties or conditions of sin especially original. To omit the distinction of sins of omission and commission, there be of sin generally or indefinitely taken (I dare not say divers kinds, but) divers stems, roots, or branches. The first root of sin was the sin of the first man, which was both an actual and habitual sin in him; the second is sin original, which is more than an habit, an hereditary disease of our nature, altogether incurable, save only by the free grace of the Son of God. Over and above both these roots or stems, there be other branches, as some sins habitual, which are acquired or produced by such precedent actual sins as we freely and frequently commit, without any necessity imposed upon us by the inhabitation of sin original in our nature. Adam's 19 first sin did CHAP. VIII. Of the Sin of the first Man, and of Sin Original which was derived from him: of Sins Actual, and the difference betwixt them. That of Sin Original the Heathens had a natural notion. 1. CONCERNING the actual sin of the first man, and the habit which it produced in himself, I have not much more to say than hath been said before, to wit, that neither could have any necessary cause, but a cause contingent only, or a free agent. Nor is there (I take it) indeed any other cause of actual or habitual sins, præter diabolum seducentem, et hominem libere consentientem, that is, "besides the devil who still laboureth to seduce or tempt us, and man's free consent or voluntary yielding to his temptations." 2. Between sin original, which is the effect, and the pollute our sin of the first man, which was the cause of it, some nature; our pollute our persons. actual sins have acutely observed this distinctionk: "That the person of the first man by his sin corrupted our nature; and our nature being corrupted by him, corrupts all our persons that come by natural descent from him." Unto which they add, "that every one of us by committing actual sin doth corrupt or pollute his person.' But whether any person besides our father Adam do or may by frequent commission of actual sins, without any necessity derivable either from our first parents' sin or from the effect of it, which is sin original, corrupt or pollute the nature of such persons as lineally k Vid. Locorum Theologicorum Compendium, pro Scholis Wratislaviensibus concinnatum. descend from him, is a point capable of question, and worthy of more accurate discussion than my abilities afford, or my years will permit me to bestow any long or serious studies in. Such as are or shall be disposed to handle this, or any of the former questions proposed, more exquisitely, must make their entrance into this search by the same plain way which I intend to follow; that is, to guess at the cause by the effect; or at the nature or essence of sin original, by the known properties or symptoms of it. And in this plain search an observant student shall hardly find such fair hints or good helps from the schoolmen, ancient or modern, as he may from some schoolboys, or at least from some good books which they usually read and better remember than the schoolmen do. nant testi 3. As for the substance or reality of that which we The pregcall original sin, though unknown to them by that monies of name, and of our natural servitude to sin, a serious divine may find more solid and lively1 expressions in 1 .... Ingenium est omnium Terence, Andr. I. i. 50.. Nec natura potest justo secernere iniquum, Hor. Sat. I. iii. 113. Me trahit invitam nova vis; aliudque Cupido parallel to that of St. Paul, Rom. vii. 21—23. Hor. Ep. I. viii. 11. Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata : Sic interdictis imminet æger aquis, etc.-Ovid. alibi. parallel to Rom. vii. 8, 9. Man's servitude to sin is well set down by Horace, lib. II. sat. 7. and in Persius, V. 75, &c. consonant to John viii. 34. And that in Pers. II. 61— O curvæ in terras animæ, et cœlestium inanes! Quid juvat hoc, templis nostros immittere mores, is parallel to Ps. 1. 21: Thou thoughtest wickedly that I was such an heathens, some heathenish naturalists, or in the Roman orator, or ancient Latin poets, than he can do in the great master of the sentences, in Aquinas, (though sainted as much for learning as for sanctity by the Romish church,) or in their followers, or such as comment upon their writings. And no marvel, if so it be, seeing the naturalist (as his profession leads him) hunts after the truth upon a fresh unfoiled scent, always insisting upon those which we call the first notions: whereas the schoolmen, the later especially, have been delighted to draw all doubts or queries about the most solid points in divinity, or matters most capable of philosophical expressions, into second notions or terms of art, or artificial fabrics of words; as if they meant to rend 20 or dissolve strong and well woven stuff into small and raveled threads; to entangle themselves and their readers in perpetual fallacies, a rebus ad voces. Nitimur in vetitum semper, cupimusque negata, was a good lesson which the facile Roman poet had not learned by hearsay or got by rote; but had got it by heart from a good instructor, as willing and ready to teach us as him; that is, from undoubted experience of his own or other men's dispositions or affections. This good poet, with some other of his profession, and other heathen orators or philosophers, have excellently observed, that the nature of man was farther out of tune or frame, had greater discord or contrariety of inclinations within itself, than the nature of any other living thing besides. But unto the nature or reality of that which divines call original sin, the Roman naturalist, (Pliny I mean,) in his proeme to the seventh book of his Natural History, speaks most fully and most appositely. The passage is (for ought I know) well translated into our English; or, if ought be amiss, the Latin reader |