IV. except the law had faid, Thou shalt not DISC. "covet." It is the law, in every cafe refpectively, which gives the knowlege of good and evil. Obedience to it is good, and the reward is life; difobedience is evil, and the penalty death. And the trial of man, thus informed, is, whether he will obey or disobey; in order to the manifeftation of the lawgiver's juftice, wisdom, power, and glory, by rewarding or punishing him, as he does the one or the other. The difficulty lies here: Why an action to appearance fo unimportant and infignificant as that of eating or forbearing to eat the fruit of a Tree fhould have been ap-. pointed as the test of his obedience ? To folve this difficulty, let it be confidered, that, befide those laws ufually termed moral, and supposed to speak their own fitness and propriety, from an obvious view of the nature and conftitution of things, it is not strange or uncommon for God to try the love and obedience of man by other • Rom. vii. 7. precepts, IV. DISC. precepts, ftyled pofitive and ceremonial. Such was the order for Abraham to quit his country and kindred, and afterward to offer his fon Ifaac: upon which latter occasion, notwithstanding the proofs before given by him of an obedient fpirit, God was pleased to say, "Now I know thou "fearest God." Such were the ritual obfervances regarding facrificature and other particulars, obferved among the patriarchs, and afterwards, with additions, republished in form by Moses. Such are the injunctions to abstinence and felf-denial, with the inftitutions of Baptism and the Lord's Supper, among Chriftians. What hath been thus done under every other difpenfation, was done likewise in Paradise. And as touching these fame precepts called pofitive, even they are not, what they are fometime deemed to be, arbitrary precepts, given for no other reason, but because it is the will of God to give them. They carry in them a reason, which, though f Gen. xxii. 12. IV. it may not be discoverable unless revealed, DISC. is yet nevertheless founded on the state of human nature, it's relation to God, and it's various wants, at different times, and in different fituations. The obfervation, indeed, made by an eminent cafuift with respect to human laws, holds much stronger with respect to laws divine. "The obe"dience of that man is much too delicate, "who infists upon knowing the reasons of "all laws before he will obey them. The legislator must be supposed to have given "his fanction from the reason of the thing; "but where we cannot discover the reason "of it, the fanction is to be the only rea"fon of our obedience." This obfervation, I fay, is moft certainly a just one. But as a wife God acts not without the highest reafon, fo a gracious God, in his difpenfations to his reasonable creatures, has, in many inftances, with his commands, communicated the reafons on which they were founded, and has even condefcended to argue with his people, on Bishop TAYLOR. the Services outward and visible have been enjoined. They have always been enjoined. But then they have always been symbolical of difpofitions and actions inward and spiritual. When this is the cafe, from unimportant and infignificant, they become the most important and fignificant transactions in the world. An uninformed perfon, living in the times of perfecution under the heathen emperors, must have been, to the last degree, aftonished and confounded, when told, that a Chriftian was in danger of eternal rejection from the prefence of God, if he scattered a handful of incense on the fire; and that he was bound, by his religion, rather to die in torments, than submit to do it. But every objection vanishes in a moment when we know that fuch an action, in a Chriftian fo circumftanced, was a token of renouncing his God and Saviour, and acknowleging a false object of worship. Το IV. To come a little nearer to the point DISC. in question. Know we not, that the action of eating, in particular, from the beginning, both among believers and unbelievers, has ever been efteemed and conftituted an action fymbolical of religious affection; and that, in the days of St. Paul, a man denominated himself either one or the other, as he partook of the Lord's table, or the table of an idol? What were thefe, in the new Paradife, the church Chriftian, but the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death? Why fhould it feem incredible, or abfurd, that, in man's original trial, the fame action should have been, in fome manner, fignificative of the fame affection? And if in that truly golden age of innocence, health, and felicity, the food allotted to man was of the vegetable kind, then the fruit of a Tree muft of courfe be the fubject of the prohibition. In after ages, under the law of Mofes and the permiffion of animal food, the figurative fyftem of rites was artificial and fanguinary; but in the facred |