ly those actions must needs be regular where there is an
identity between the rule and the faculty. His own mind taught him a
due dependence upon God, and chalked out to him the just proportions
and measures of behavior to his fellow creatures. He had no catechism
but the creation, needed no study but reflection, read no book but the
volume of the world, and that too, not for the rules to work by,
but for the objects to work upon. Reason was his tutor, and first
principles his _magna moralia_. The decalogue of Moses was but a
transcript, not an original. All the laws of nations, and wise decrees
of states, the statutes of Solon, and the twelve tables, were but
a paraphrase upon this standing rectitude of nature, this fruitful
principle of justice, that was ready to run out and enlarge itself
into suitable demonstrations upon all emergent objects and occasions.

And this much for the image of God, as it shone in man's
understanding.

II. Let us in the next place take a view of it as it was stamped upon
the will. It is much disputed by divines concerning the power of man's
will to good and evil in the state of innocence: and upon very nice
and dangerous precipices stand their determinations on either side.
Some hold that God invested him with a power to stand so that in the
strength of that power received, he might, without the auxiliaries of
any further influence, have determined his will to a full choice
of good. Others hold that notwithstanding this power, yet it was
impossible for him to exert it in any good action without a superadded
assistance of grace actually determining that power to the certain
production of such an act; so that whereas some distinguish between
sufficient and effectual grace, they order the matter so as to
acknowledge some sufficient but what is indeed effected, and
actually productive of good action. I shall not presume to interpose
dogmatically in a controversy which I look never to see decided. But
concerning the latter of these opinions, I shall only give these two
remarks:

1. That it seems contrary to the common and natural conceptions of all
mankind, who acknowledge themselves able and sufficient to do many
things which actually they never do.

2. That to assert that God looked upon Adam's fall as a sin, and
punished it as such when, without any antecedent sin of his, he
withdrew that actual grace from him upon the withdrawing of which
it was impossible for him not to fall, seems a