Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/22

18 MAN, when formed into the image and likeness of his Creator, was in the just and full exercise of two original faculties, called rationality and liberty. By rationality is meant the faculty of understanding what is true and false, also what is good and evil: and by liberty is meant the faculty of thinking, willing, and acting, in a state of perfect freedom. These two faculties were implanted in man at his creation; they are still in him at his birth into the world; and they are never absolutely taken away from him. But they are not, properly speaking, his own; they are only lent or continually communicated to him, being of and from the Lord in him, insomuch that they may be said to be the dwelling-place or residence of God with every man, enabling him to think and speak, to will and act, in all appearance as of himself. These faculties, thus appealing in him as his own, constitute his capacity of entering into reciprocal conjunction with his Creator, and consequently of living for ever. By these also he is capable of being reformed and regenerated; and by these he is distinguished from the brute beasts.

Man then being thus created and formed into an image and likeness of his God, and feeling in himself the life imparted to him in all respects as if it were his own, his integrity consisted in perpetually acknowledging from his heart, that all he had was the Lord's in him. But it is plain, that, while this derived life appeared to be in him as his own, though in reality it was not so, he must necessarily have had the power either of ascribing it to the Lord, according to the real truth of the case, or to himself, according to the mere appearance. For without this possibility he could not have existed a single moment