Aphorisms of justification, with their explication annexed wherein also is opened the nature of…Aphorismes of justification, with their explication annexed wherein also is opened the nature of…

Therefore it is one thing to ask, whether the Covenant of Works be abolished? and another thing, whether the Moral Law be abolished? Yet that no one Precept of either Moral or Ceremonial Law was delivered without reference to one of the Covenants, is very evident. For if the breach of that Command be a sin, and to be punished, then either according to the rigorous threatening of the old Covenant, or according to the way and justice of the new. For the Law, as it was delivered by Moses, may be reduced in several respects to each of these Covenants, and cannot constitute a third Covenant, wholly distinct from both these; and therefore Camero doth more fitly call it a subservient Covenant, then a third Covenant. For either God intended in that Covenant to proceed with sinners in strict rigour of Justice, for every sin; and then it is reducible to the first Covenant: Or else to pardon sin upon certain conditions, ⟨p. 95⟩and to dispense with the rigour of that first Covenant: And then it must imply satisfaction for those sins; and so be reducible to the second Covenant: (For I cannot yet digest the Doctrine of Grotius and Vossius, concerning satisfaction by sacrifice for temporal punishment, without subordination to the satisfaction by Christ:) Or if it seem in several phrases to savour of the language of the several Covenants, (as indeed it doth;) that is because they are yet both in force; and in several respects it is reducible to both. So that when we demand, whether the Moral Law do yet bind, the question is ambiguous, from the ambiguity of the term [Bind.] For it is one thing to ask, whether it bind upon the old Covenant terms? another, whether upon new Covenant terms? and a third, whether as a mere Precept? Here a question or two must be answered.