In which Sin and the Fall, with their consequences, are the Subject of Discourse , between Mr. Enquirer and Mr. Instructor, whose names I am inclined to exchange for Senior and Junior.

THESE Dialogists are to be considered as two so intimate and united in friendship, as to love each other as David and Jonathan did, of the latter of whom it is said, he loved David as his own soul.

The discourse begins as follows, Mr. Enquirer addresses Mr. Instructor, thus: --- Sir, I have often looked at, and considered you as a monument of God's mercy; as one of long continuation "in the good ways of God; as a person who must, I conceive, have attained a good degree in the faith which is in Christ. I should, therefore, be glad of some free personal conversation with you; as I expect it would-redound to my own profit and real satisfaction. I hope you will not object to this. It may be, it may redound to the advantage of others also.

Mr. Instructor. For my own part, I should be most truly glad to communicate any knowledge to my good friend, which might contribute to his spiritual advantage. I am very greatly advanced in age, yet I would not have you forget what one of noble extraction once said in company with Many honorable persons: great men are not always wise; neither do the aged understand judgment. I am an old man; yet it does not follow that I am a wise man. I am an old disciple of our Lord; yet it does not from hence follow that you will find me full of spiritual knowledge and spirituality. If you would converse with me, you must take me just as I am: you must not overrate me. Take me as I am: that is, if you would prefer a conversation with me.

Enquirer. This, my good Sir, I most readily Will. I shall use no sort of flattering words. All I aim at, is to gain some spiritual light and instruction into the truths, mysteries, and things of God. I am persuaded, in the course of conversation, you will, through the good hand of our God upon you, be useful to me.

Instructor. No one can be more desirous to pour out his whole soul into the bosom of his friend, than I am to communicate the whole of my spiritual knowledge to you.

Enquirer. Sir, I most heartily thank you. I have good reason for believing it; having by long familiarity and acquaintance with you, proved the truth of this: I therefore request you would kindly give me all the light you can, from the knowledge and experience of them in your own mind, of the most important truths which concern salvation, faith, and experience, contained in the everlasting gospel of the blessed God.

Instructor. I am at your service. But pray state what you conceive those most important subjects you want light and instruction into are.

Enquirer. I thank you, Sir, for this act of kindness. I will. What in a very particular manner appear to me to be such subjects as I want more fully to be acquainted with, are (1). Sin (2). Regeneration (3). Salvation (4). Faith, in Christ (5). The Person of Christ (6). The Knowledge of Christ (7). On Communion with Christ (8). On the Ordinances of Baptism and the Lord's Supper (9). On Church Fellowship (10). On Death (11). Concerning entrance into the invisible State (12). On Eternal Glory.. Now, I should conceive, were my mind more clearly apprehensive of these subjects, and were they so stated in my mind, as they are in the written word, I should thereby be brought under the mighty influence and authority of them, and thereby be influenced in mind, will, and affections, to walk before the Lord unto all well pleasing.

Instructor. You have most certainly expressed the most important subjects in all the Bible. It will require a long confabulation to enter into each, and every one of them distinctly.

Enquirer. I perceive it will; yet, as they are distinct subjects, and a clear apprehension, however short of a full one, would be of advantage to me, I would request the favor of a discussion on each of them. Will you be pleased to admit me to ask such questions on these great subjects, as may be instructive to my mind?

Instructor. Most certainly I will; yet I hope you will proceed orderly in your enquiries concerning these subjects; so as to keep them distinct, and not break in one upon the other.

Enquirer. As you are in every sense in my view, in age, judgment, experience, and utterance, far beyond and above me, I really should like these terms, Senior and Junior, as the distinguishing titles between us. I will, therefore, address you now, and in my further discourses, as Senior, and will consider myself, as I am, the Junior; and I beg, if you have any objection, you will express the same.

Senior. I have not: I accept the term very cordially, as an aged person. I am just entering on the seventieth year of my age, you may, therefore, without adulation, look on me so according to my years; and, as we do not mean to compliment each other, we will therefore be content, in speaking by way of conversation, to address each other under these titles.

Junior. Sir, I must confess, you are very kind and obliging. I thank you for it. May the Lord Jesus Christ be with our spirits, so as to render the subjects designed to be descanted upon, very profitable to both our minds; for, whilst I look on you, and would with real integrity and respect, treat and acknowledge you as my superior in every sense, as it relates to ears, the knowledge of Christ, and experimental, communion with him; yet I conceive your own mind may be really improved, by the drawing it forth to answer such questions as I have in my own intention to propose unto you.

Senior. I have no objection to conceive it may be so. I remember the great Apostle of the Gentiles, writing to the saints at Rome, says, I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established. That is, that I may be comforted together with you, by the mutual faith both of you and me. Rom. I:11,12.

Junior. Sir, I cannot express my real sentiments of gratitude, for your very great generosity in what hath already passed between us. Now, Sir, I will propose for our present conversation, the following subjects: VIZ: Sin and the Fall, with their consequences.  I am a sinner. I know and feel I am so in my very nature. I read, By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all I have sinned. Rom. 5:12. Yet I understand at the beginning of the creation of God, there was no such evil as sin; I want, therefore, to have an account of God's creation of man, and how he, created pure and holy, could possibly become impure and unholy. This, therefore, Sir, I request your account of.

Senior. It is an immutable truth, that the Lord our God is holy. He created all things by his almighty power. His wisdom was displayed in and throughout the whole creation. It was all an act of his sovereign will. Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are, and were created. Rev. 4:11. God himself pronounced all things in, and throughout the whole creation, to be good. God saw all things, he saw every thing that he had made, and behold, it was very good. Gen. I:31. Then there was no sin in existence. He created man in his own image, in righteousness and true holiness: consequently, man was not a sinner at his creation; neither was there any sin or sinfulness in his constitution; yet he was not immutable; so neither were the angels. Now sin is not so much a positive act, as a privation. It produces many positive acts; yet, in its first original, it was the defect of the mind of the first man. He ceased to will what was the will of God; hence he ceased to be holy. In that very instant he lost the holiness of all his faculties. He no longer continued in the image of God. He was deprived of all good, and was the subject of a positive inclination to all evil. This was the origin of sin.

Junior. Pray, Sir, what is sin?

Senior. Sin is the act of the mind. It is a transgression of God's law. Angels in heaven, man upon the earth, were created under the law, as a covenant of works. The transgression of the law, was sin, which, on its first entrance, corrupted all the faculties of the mind; so that fallen angels, and fallen man, having their minds corrupted by it, are fallen from God, and most justly deserve his curse and wrath.

Junior. But there is something so tremendous in the idea, of sin being the cause of damnation, that I cannot but tremble at the thought.

Senior. It is so. Yet, we may rest assured, God cannot perform an unrighteous act; therefore, He cannot punish sin beyond its demerit.

Junior. Pray speak out more freely, and say what sin hath done in us; what its greatest evil consists in; what it hath produced, doth, and will produce, in such as live and die under its guilt and dominion.

Senior. Sin is an internal evil, though it is manifested in many external and outward effects. The whole seat of sin in us, is in the will. It spreads its influence throughout every faculty, affection, disposition, and frame of the whole man. both body and soul. Its greatest evil consists in its taking off  the whole heart from God; so that the mind is blinded; the will is in every particular opposite to the will of God; the affections are set on wrong objects; the members of the body are members of unrighteousness.  There is in every faculty of the mind, and throughout every member of the body, a total privation of all good, and a positive inclination to all evil: this is the whole of what fallen man is, and this is the consequence of the fall. And every man is equally and alike fallen. No one is more fallen than another. No: all mankind are equal here. The word of God declares, All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. Rom. 3:23.

Junior. But I want to know how man could fall from God, if he was created in the image of God, and in a state of perfection at and by his creation.

Senior. That is very easy to be shewed. Angels and man were both perfectly holy and pure in their creation state. Whilst they remained therein, they were in a state of creature perfection; yet they were not immutable, nor impeccable by creation. They were left to the mutability of their wills; to which mutability we must ascribe the fall of angels and men. Now God alone is immutable. He cannot make a creature immutable. He can continue the will of a rational creature immutable and impeccable, but he cannot make a creature so; it being an essential perfection of the Divine Essence, which cannot exist in creatures.

Junior. You have really thrown considerable light upon this subject on my mind. If I have understood you right, sin is the defect of the creature. Its propensity to sink into itself; its centering in itself; its going off from God; its seeking content, rest, and satisfaction in itself, in its own acts, in the creature, in any thing but God alone.

Senior. It is so. You have conceived the subject very correctly.

Junior. But how could this originally befall man, if he was created pure and holy? Was not God's will the rule, and his glory the end, of man?

Senior. God's glory was the end, and his will, revealed in the moral law, man's chief and highest rule; yet the mind of man, as created by God, was vastly capacious and apprehensive. He had the whole world made for him, and he was made for it. Every creature in it was formed for his use, and to give him delight. He was himself the epitome of all creation in this our world. He was to enjoy God in the creatures, and by them to aspire in praise and admiration up to God, the fountain of the whole creation, and of all the good contained in it. Now his mind being full of activity, it was possible for him, in the multiplicity of subjects, to forget to think of God aright. Hence it was possible for him to sin; and, I conceive, sin entered in at this door. He ceased to think holily, which was his fall from God. His actual fall was the effect of this: at least I conceive thus of it.

Junior. Sir, then you conceive it was owing to the mutability of man's will, that he became a sinner.

Senior. I do. And so it was the case with the fallen angels.

Junior. Really, Sir, I must confess this clears up the subject of the Fall, so as no imputation can fall on God as the author of sin, to my very great satisfaction.

Senior. Sin is not so much a positive, as a privative evil. It is a mental one, although it manifests, itself in all sorts of actual evils. It first began in the mind. It is always residentiary in the will. It is put forth into act, as various temptations call it forth into act and exercise. Sin is not without us: it is inherent in us. It is our nature corrupted by the fall. This is what sin is.

Junior. Then, Sir, you distinguish these subjects, do you not? That sin produced the fall: this produces all actual evils. That the circumstances of the fall, are most truly fatal to the souls and bodies of men.

Senior. This, Sir, is my apprehension of these subjects. All the miseries in earth and hell, are the fruits and effects of sin. Damnation is the desert of every sin. There are none damned, but for sin. There are none  of the fallen race, in hell, but for sin. Neither you nor I can escape the damnation of hell by any thing we can do or perform. No. Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things, which are written in the book of the law to do them.

Junior. Sir, I have experienced the truth of what you now say in my own mind. It hath pleased the Lord the Spirit, to convince me of sin; of my own personal and constitutional sin. I have seen it in its guilt. I have been led to conceive of the exceeding sinfulness of it; the horrible pollution of it; the damnable nature of it; the tremendous demerit of the same. It has caused me to groan on account of it before the Lord. I have confessed it; I have most deeply lamented it; I have pleaded Christ, his doings and sufferings; have obtained relief here from; yet, alas! Alas! I feel and experience myself the subject of the same corrupted nature I have ever been: indeed, Sir, I do. What am I to think of my case and state?

Senior. It always appears to me a real evidence of grace, and the true operation of the Holy Spirit on the mind, where a sense of the exceeding sinfulness is abiding on the mind. I conceive, without it, we should never wholly renounce all hope in ourselves; therefore, I say neither your case, nor state is affected by any sights, feelings, and apprehensions you may have in your mind of the depth of sin, and the mystery of iniquity you experience in your fallen nature. I would not have you at any time dwell on it. Look to Christ: go to him with it: carry it all with you,, and present yourself before Him. Entreat Him to look on you: to consider your case; to interpose on your behalf; to bestow on you the blessings of his intercession and advocacy. This is the only word of advice I can give you. May the Lord make it effectual.

Junior. But if I might speak out, good Sir, the whole of my heart, really the longer I live, the more I experience my own inward sinfulness. It is not out ward acts of wickedness I am speaking of; neither is it a giving myself up to any acts of sin: but what I lament is, what I am, and see myself to be, in my old Adam nature. There is no change in it: there is no holiness in it: there is no purity in it. I do see, in point of sinfulness, it cannot be exceeded by any of the damned in hell. What say you to this? What can you think of me, when I open myself thus freely to you?

Senior. I am rather inclined to think, this is full proof of a spiritual and supernatural birth in your soul. The. Apostle says, I know, that in me, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing. But it is time to close our present conversation; I therefore bid you, for the, present-Farewell.