A treatise of original sin ... proving that it is

To understand it therefore consider, That whereas Job in the former verses had asserted the vanity and mortality of man, comparing him to a flower, which though sweet for a while, yet is presently cut down. Thus all the comforts, all the joys thou hast in this world, they are but a Poesy, which have a pin within them to prick thee for the present, while thou smellest on them, and will quickly wither away. But because flowers also have some substance and sweetness for the present, in the next place he resembleth our life to a shadow, which as he said was nigrum nihil, a black nothing; There is both emptiness and transitoriness in all these things; and hitherto all the Heathens have arrived, They all perceived these miseries and troubles we are obnoxious unto: But then in my Text, we have the cause of this, which they were either totally or in a great measure ignorant of; God then did not make man like a shadow thus at first; but sin brought this corruptibility into the world, and that not actual sin, but ⟨p. 49⟩original; If there had been none but this, yet all these miseries would have fallen upon mankind.

To understand it therefore consider, That whereas Job in the former verses had asserted the vanity and mortality of man, comparing him to a flower, which though sweet for a while, yet is presently cut down. Thus all the comforts, all the joyes thou hast in this world, they are but a Poesie, which have a pinne within them to prick thee for the present, while thou smellest on them, and will quickly wither away. But because flowers also have some substance and sweetness for the present, in the next place he resembleth our life to a shadow, which as he said was nigrum nihil, a black nothing; There is both emptiness and transitoriness in all these things; and hitherto all the Heathens have arrived, They all perceived these miseries and troubles we are obnoxious unto: But then in my Text, we have the cause of this, which they were either totally or in a great measure ignorant of; God then did not make man like a shadow thus at first; but sinne brought this corruptibility into the world, and that not actual sinne, but ⟨p. 49⟩original; If there had been none but this, yet all these miseries would have fallen upon mankind.