Page:A Compendium of the Chief Doctrines of the True Christian Religion.djvu/26

22 and 13th verses of the sixth chapter: "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them: and behold, I will destroy them with the earth." Yet, notwithstanding this general depravity and wickedness, there were still some left, who retained within themselves the capacity of being restored to a certain degree of integrity, by the reception of charity and faith from the Lord. These were represented by Noah and his family, who were preserved in the ark; and with them a new church was raised up, in the room of that which perished.

The state of man was now changed: his mind, and in some measure his body also, became the subjects of a new organization: for, whereas before the fall his will and understanding, or his two faculties of willing and thinking, were inseparably united, the latter constantly acting in subserviency to the former, after the fall, more especially after it's entire completion, the one acquired the power of being elevated above the other; that is to say, the understanding in it's separate capacity could contemplate truth, and acknowledge the justice of it's dictates, while the will still remained in the love and practice of evil. At the same time external respiration commenced, and together with it external language, sonorous and articulate; to which succeeded a written revelation, or divine rule of life, and external worship, each adapted to the state of man, now so essentially changed from what it had been previously to his fall.

This inversion of the order, in which man was originally created, being that also to which the whole