* What therefore can it be called, but a most deplorable blindness in learned reason, to consider man as making his first entrance into paradise in no _better a state than that of dust and clay_, formed into a dead lumpish figure of a man, for this reason, because he was said to be formed out of the dust of the ground? Blindness indeed! when it is so evident, _that_ even now, after the curse is in the earth, yet every thing, even the poorest _weed_ that comes out of the dust of the ground, is in a much higher state, and enters into this world with a degree of life from its mother _the_ earth.――Had the Doctor never seen, or heard of any other things formed out of the earth, but such as our potters, and dealers in clay can make out of it, there might have been some sort of excuse for his _Adam_ of dead clay formed out of the earth. But when every day of his life has shewn him that almost infinite variety, powers, virtues and wonders in the kingdom of vegetables, all coming out of the earth, and nourished by it; when the scripture has told him _that_ the beasts and cattle of all kinds were formed out of the earth, and their flesh and blood from it, and their daily sustenance from its fruitful womb: it is strange to a degree of astonishment, that he should hold, _that_ out of this _rich_ earth, when in its paradisical state, when man, the glory of the creation, was formed out of it, and God the former, nothing would come forth, but a dead lump of clay in the figure of a man.
_Again_, What a total disregard has the Doctor here shewn to the very letter of scripture? The text saith, _God formed man out of the dust of the ground_, nothing else is ascribed to God, as his work in this matter; but the Doctor adds quite another matter as the work of God, namely, shaping and forming lumpish clay into a dead figure of a man.
And then follows another fiction equally against the letter of scripture. For he says, that AFTERWARDS, God, breathed life into it. But in the scripture account, there is not a syllable of any first, or afterwards.――Two things are spoken of the birth of man, and as they cannot be spoken both at once, so one must come after the other in the relation of them. The scripture mentions them as two distinct things; and the reason of mentioning them thus distinctly, is not to teach us, they were done at two different times, the one first, and the other afterwards, but to give us the assurance, that man came into the world in a twofold nature, the one from the heavenly breath of God, and the other from this visible world.
But the union of these two natures in the formation of man, was owing to one, and the same operation of God.――There is no sooner, or later, in the beginning of the soul, and of the body: the beginning of one, is the beginning of the other.
To suppose that man was made a dead image, and afterwards had life breathed into it, is no better philosophy, than to suppose, that God first created the vegetable creature, and afterwards added a vegetable life to it; that he first created the globe of the sun, and afterwards added heat and light to it.
_God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature._ What a folly to suppose, that the creature, and its life, are two separate things, that the one came first, and the other afterwards? No better, than supposing, that a circle and its roundness, are two separate things, that first comes forth the figure, and afterwards its roundness.