disease so long as temperance
from the forbidden fruit secured him. Nature was his physician, and
innocence and abstinence would have kept him healthful to immortality.

The two great perfections that both adorn and exercise man's
understanding, are philosophy and religion: for the first of these,
take it even among the professors of it where it most flourished, and
we shall find the very first notions of common-sense debauched by
them. For there have been such as have asserted, "that there is no
such thing in the world as motion: that contradictions may be true."
There has not been wanting one that has denied snow to be white. Such
a stupidity or wantonness had seized upon the most raised wits that it
might be doubted whether the philosophers or the owls of Athens
were the quicker sighted. But then for religion; what prodigious,
monstrous, misshapen births has the reason of fallen man produced!
It is now almost six thousand years that far the greater part of the
world has had no other religion but idolatry: and idolatry certainly
is the first-born of folly, the great and leading paradox, nay, the
very abridgment and sum total of all absurdities. For is it not
strange that a rational man should worship an ox, nay, the image of an
ox? That he should fawn upon his dog? Bow himself before a cat? Adore
leeks and garlic, and shed penitential tears at the smell of a deified
onion? Yet so did the Egyptians, once the famed masters of all arts
and learning. And to go a little further, we have yet a stronger
instance in Isaiah, "A man hews him down a tree in the wood, and a
part of it he burns, with the residue thereof he maketh a god." With
one part he furnishes his chimney, with the other his chapel. A
strange thing that the fire must first consume this part and then burn
incense to that. As if there was more divinity in one end of the
stick than in the other; or, as if he could be graved and painted
omnipotent, or the nails and the hammer could give it an apotheosis!
Briefly, so great is the change, so deplorable the degradation of our
nature, that whereas we bore the image of God, we now retain only the
image of man.

In the last place, we learn hence the excellency of Christian
religion, in that it is the great and only means that God has
sanctified and designed to repair the breaches of humanity, to set
fallen man upon his legs again, to clarify his reason, to rectify his
will, and to compose and regulate his affections.