Wherefore, doubtless the will of man in the state of innocence had an entire freedom, a perfect equipendency and indifference to either part of the contradiction, to stand, or not to stand; to accept, or not to accept the temptation.  I will grant the will of man now to be as much a slave as any one who will have it, and be only free to sin; that is, instead of a liberty, to have only a licentiousness; yet certainly this is not nature, but chance.  We were not born crooked; we learned these windings and turnings of the serpent:  and therefore it can not but be a blasphemous piece of ingratitude to ascribe them to God, and to make the plague of our nature the condition of our creation.

The will was then ductile and pliant to all the motions of right reason; it met the dictates of a clarified understanding half way.  And the active informations of the intellect, filling the passive reception of the will, like form closing with matter, grew actuate into a third and distinct perfection of practise; the understanding and will never disagreed; for the proposals of the one never thwarted the inclinations of the other.  Yet neither did the will servilely attend upon the understanding, but as a favorite does upon his prince, where the service is privilege and preferment; or as Solomon’s servants waited upon him:  it admired its wisdom, and heard its prudent dictates and counsels—­both the direction and the reward of its obedience.  It is indeed the nature of this faculty to follow a superior guide—­to be drawn by the intellect; but then it was drawn as a triumphant chariot, which at the same time both follows and triumphs:  while it obeyed this, it commanded the other faculties.  It was subordinate, not enslaved to the understanding:  not as a servant to a master, but as a queen to her king, who both acknowledges a subjection and yet retains a majesty.

III.  Pass we now downward from man’s intellect and will to the passions, which have their residence and situation chiefly in the sensitive appetite.  For we must know that inasmuch as man is a compound, and mixture of flesh as well as spirit, the soul, during its abode in the body, does all things by the mediation of these passions and inferior affections.  And here the opinion of the Stoics was famous and singular, who looked upon all these as sinful defects and irregularities, as so many deviations from right reason, making passion to be only another word for perturbation.  Sorrow in their esteem was a sin scarce to be expiated by another; to pity, was a fault; to rejoice, an extravagance; and the apostle’s advice, “to be angry and sin not,” was a contradiction in their philosophy.  But in this they were constantly outvoted by other sects of philosophers, neither for fame nor number less than themselves:  so that all arguments brought against them from divinity would come in by way of overplus to their confutation.  To us let this be sufficient, that our Savior Christ, who took upon