relation to the curse and threatening, man cannot satisfy it--no price, no
ransom being found sufficient for the soul for the redemption of it is
precious, and ceaseth for ever. That curse hath infinite wrath in it,
which must needs swallow up finite man. And then in relation to the
command, there is such a diminution of all the powers of the soul, such a
corruption and defilement, by reason of the first sin, that that wherein
man's strength lay, which was God's image, is cut off and spoiled, so that
henceforth it is become impossible to yield any acceptable obedience to
the commandment. And hence it is, from our impossibility to obey in time
to come, that there is a holy and faultless impossibility upon the
promise, to give life unto mankind. So you see that the law cannot do it,
because of our weakness. If either man, while he was made upright, had
continued in obedience, or man now fallen from uprightness, could satisfy
for the fault done, and walk without any blemish in time coming, then it
were feasible for the law to give life to us. But the one was not done,
and the other now cannot be done, and so the impossibility of life by
works, is refounded upon ourselves, who would not when we could, and now
neither will nor can obey. Thus we may see clearly, that all mankind must
needs perish, for any thing that man can do, and according to that first
transaction of God with man, unless some other way and device be found
out, which indeed was far from the eyes of all living,--without the reach
of their invention or imagination. I believe if all the creatures, higher
or lower, that have any reason, had convened to consult of this business,
how to repair that breach made in the creation by man's sin, they might
have vexed their brains, and racked their inventions unto all eternity,
and yet never have fallen upon any probable way of making up this breach.
They might have taken up a lamentation, not as the bemoaners of Babylon's
ruin,--"we would have healed thee, and thou wouldst not,"--but rather
thus,--we would heal thee, but we could not, and thou wouldst not. This
design, which is here mentioned of repairing the breach, by destroying
that which made it, sin, lay hid in the depth of God's wisdom, till it
pleased himself to vent and publish it unto poor, forlorn, and desperate
man, who, out of despair of recovery, had run away to hide himself. A poor
shift indeed, for him to think that he could hide himself from him to whom
da