It was the privilege of Adam innocent, to have these notions also firm and untainted, to carry his monitor in his bosom, his law in his heart, and to have such a conscience as might be its own casuist; and certainly 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 thing that highly reproaches the essential equity and goodness of the divine nature.