this manner, he gave him
a law, and then he made a covenant with him. There was a law first
imprinted into Adam, and then a law prescribed unto him. There was a law
written in his heart, the remainder of which Paul saith makes the Gentiles
"inexcusable," but it was perfectly drawn in him. All the principles and
notions of good and evil were exactly drawn in it. He had a natural
discerning of them, and a natural inclination to all good, and aversion
from all evil, as there is a kind of law imposed by God upon other
creatures, which they constantly keep and do not swerve from, even his
decree and commandment, to the obedience of which they are composed and
framed. The sea hath a law and command to flow and ebb, and it is that
command that breaks its proud waves on the sand, when they threaten to
overflow mountains. The beasts obey a law, written in their natures, of
eating and drinking, of satisfying their senses, and every one hath its
several instinct and propension to several operations, so God gave a more
noble instinct unto man, suitable to his reasonable soul,--an instinct and
impulse to please God, in such duties of holiness and righteousness, a
sympathy with such ways of integrity and godliness, and an innate
antipathy against such ways as were displeasing to him or dishonourable to
the creature. There is a kind of comeliness and sweet harmony and
proportion between such works, as the love of God and man, the use of all
for his glory, of whom all things are, and man's reasonable being. Such a
thing doth suit and become it. Again, other things, as the hatred of God
and men, neglect and forgetfulness of him, drunkenness and abasing lusts
of that kind, do disagree, and are indecent to it. O how happy was Adam,
when holiness and righteousness were not written on tables of stone, but
on his heart, and when there was no need of external persuasion, but there
was an inward impulse, inclining him strongly, and laying a kind of sweet
necessity upon him to that which was both his duty to God and men and his
own dignity and privilege! This was, no question, the very beauty of his
soul--to be not only under a law proper and peculiar to himself, but to be
inwardly framed and moulded to it--to be a living law unto himself.

But besides this inward imprinted law of holiness and righteousness, which
did without more rules direct and determine him to that which is in itself
good, it pleased the Lord to prescribe and impose a positiv