not conducing to that true
blessedness he sought after,--but hurtful and destructive, nothing but
grief and sorrow in it. After he had proved all, with a resolution to be
wise, yet it was far from him; "I said, I will be wise, but it was far
from me," ver. 23. And therefore, after long wandering abroad, he returns
at length home to himself, to know the estate of mankind. "Lo, this only
have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out
many inventions." When I have searched all other things, and found many
things by search, yet, says he, what doth it all concern me, when I am
ignorant of myself? There is one thing concerns me more than all,--to know
the original of man, what he once was made, and to know how far he is
departed from his original. This only I have found profitable to men: and
as the entry and preparation to that blessedness I inquire for,--to have
the true discovery of our misery.

There are two things, then, concerning man, that you have to search and to
know; and that not in a trifling or curious manner, as if you had no other
end in it but to know it as men do in other things, but in a serious and
earnest way, as in a matter of so much concernment to our eternal
well-being. In things that relate particularly to ourselves, we labour to
know them for some advantage besides the knowing of them, even though they
be but small and lower things; how much more should we propose this unto
ourselves in the search and examination of our own estate, not merely to
know such a thing, but so to know it that we may be stirred up and
provoked in the sense of it to look after the remedy that God holds forth.
There are two things that you have to know,--what man once was made, and
how he is now unmade; how happy once, and how miserable now. And
answerable to these two, are branches of the text: "God made man upright;"
that he was once; "and they have sought out many inventions;" not being
contented with that blessedness they were created into, by catching at a
higher estate of wisdom, have fallen down into a gulf of misery; as the
man that gazed on the stars above him, and did not take notice of the pit
under his feet till he fell into it; and thus man is now. So you have a
short account of the two estates of men; of the estate of grace and
righteousness without sin, and the estate of sin and misery without grace.
You have the true story of man from the creation unto his present
condition; but all the