enter upon mankind, and sin
cannot enter without this companion, death. Sin goes before, and death
follows on the back of it; and these suit one another, as the work and the
wages, as the tree and the fruit. They have a fitness one to another.
Sowing to corruption reaps an answerable harvest, to wit, corruption.
Sowing to the wind, and reaping the whirlwind, how suitable are they! That
men may know how evil and bitter a thing sin is, he makes this the fruit
of it in his first law and sanction given out to men,--he joins them
inseparably,--sin and death, sin and wrath, sin and a curse. By death is
not only meant bodily death, which is the separation of the soul from the
body, but first the spiritual death of the soul, consisting in a
separation of the soul from God's blessed, enlightening, enlivening, and
comforting countenance. Man's true life, wherein he differs from beasts,
consists in the right aspect of God upon his soul,--in his walking with
God, and keeping communion with him. All things besides this are but
common and base, and this was cut off. His comfort, his joy and peace in
God extinct, God became terrible to his conscience; and therefore man did
flee and was afraid, when he heard his voice in the garden. Sin being
interposed between God and the soul, cut off all the influence of heaven.
Hence arises darkness of mind, hardness of heart, delusions, vile
affections, horrors of conscience. Look what difference is between a
living creature and a dead carcase, so much is between Adam's soul,
upright, living in God, and Adam's soul separated from God by sin. Then
upon the outward man the curse redounds. The body becomes mortal which had
been incorruptible. It is now like a besieged city. Now some outer forts
are gained by diseases, now by pains and torments; the outward walls of
the body are at length overcome; and when life hath fled into a castle
within the city, the heart, that is, last of all, besieged so straitly,
and stormed so violently, that it must render unto death upon any terms.
The body of man is even a seminary of a world of diseases and grievances,
that if men could look upon it aright, they might see the sentence of
death every day performed. Then how many evils in estate, in friends and
relations, in employments, which being considered by heathens, hath made
them praise the dead more than the living, but him not yet born most of
all, because the present life is nothing else but a valley of misery and