world without travel, it being a lesser scheme of the creation, nature contracted a little cosmography or map of the universe.  Neither was the body then subject to distempers, to die by piecemeal, and languish under coughs, catarrhs, or consumptions.  Adam knew no 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.  The whole business of our redemption is, in short, only to rub over the defaced copy of the creation, to reprint God’s image upon the soul, and, as it were, to set forth nature in a second and fairer edition; the recovery of which lost image, as it is God’s pleasure to command, and our duty to endeavor, so it is in His power only to effect; to whom be rendered and ascribed, as is most due, all praise, might, majesty, and dominion, both now and forever more.  Amen.