e being given to him which never had the power to make one
endeavour to live for ever? It is answered, God did not create men in a
state of condemnation, but sin invaded them, and in one all fell. God is
righteous, and his justice finds every one of the family of man guilty.
The rectitude of God's character did not require that he should create
any one with a title to eternal life; but because of sin, it forbade
that any of the children of fallen man represented by him should come
into existence in a state of acceptance with him. The case of the sinner
coming into the world under condemnation, is not worse than that of him,
who, first having had power to stand, was tempted, and sinned, and fell.
No less consistent with the excellence of the character of God and the
sovereignty of his procedures, is the state of one fallen even at the
very origin of his being, than that of one who had had an opportunity to
avoid falling, but after a short trial really fell. Adam at first had
not a right, independently of the sovereign gift of God, to come into
existence in a state of acceptance. He had not a right to continue in it
when he sinned. And in like manner, no sinner can say that he had a
claim upon the Creator to be brought into being free from the curse. The
same argument that would suffice to establish that men should not be
implicated in the rebellion of Adam, would go to prove that he should
not have been allowed himself to fall. And hence the repugnance of men
to the doctrine of original sin is unwarranted, and affords no proper
ground on which to deny the Covenant of Works.

Secondly. The wicked, whether individuals or communities, and these
alone, are not in covenant. Man in innocence was never under the law of
God merely as a law. The will of God, promulgated as the terms both of a
covenant and a law, had the sacredness of a law; acceded to by man, it
had all the sanctity of a covenant. The will of God was propounded as a
law, to be received both as a law and as a covenant; the acceptance of
it engaged man to it as possessed of both characters. Because of God's
authority dictating it as a law, his will revealed conferred obligation.
Because of God's will and providential arrangements as to the
constitution of man, he acquiescing in the requirement of the law came
besides under a covenant obligation to fulfil it. At the very origin of
his being he came under both obligations. Under both he was placed
according to the app