Exercitations concerning the name, original, nature, use, and continuance of a day of sacred…

(2.) For those Expressions insisted on, of Work, servile work, work for six Days, of servants and handmaids, of the stranger within the Gates, they were necessary Explications of the Command in its Application unto that people; and yet such as had a just proportion unto what was enjoined at the first giving of this command; occasioned from the outward change of the state of things ⟨p. 92⟩amongst men, from what it was in Innocency. For in that state God designed man to work, and that in the tilling of the Ground, whilst he abode in it, Gen. 2. 15. He put the Man in the Garden, [Greek or Hebrew] to work in it; the same word whereby Work is enjoined in the Decalogue. And whereas God had sanctified the seventh Day to be a Day of Rest, and thereon put man into the Garden, [Greek or Hebrew] to till it, by work and labour; He did virtually say unto him as in the Command, [Greek or Hebrew]. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. Neither was this in the least inconsistent with the condition wherein he was created. For man being constituted and composed partly of an Immortal soul, of a Divine Extract and Heavenly Original, and partly of a Body made out of the Earth, he was a middle creature between those which were purely Spiritual as the Angels, and those which were purely Terrestrial, as the Beasts of the Field. Hence when God had made man, [Greek or Hebrew] of dust from out of the Earth, as all the Beasts of the Field were made; and had given him distinctly [Greek or Hebrew], a breath of life in a distinct substance answerable to that of the Angels above, whose creation was not out of any pre-existing matter, but they were the product of an immediate Emanation of Divine Power, as was the soul of man; there was no meet help to be associated unto him in the whole Creation of God. For the Angels were not meet for his help and individual converse, on the account of what was terrene and mortal in him. And the Beasts were much more unsuited unto him, as having nothing in them to answer his ⟨p. 93⟩Divine and more noble part. And as his Nature was thus constituted, that he should converse, as it were amphibiously, between the upper and inferior sort of creatures; so he was divided in his Work and Operations suitably unto the Principles of his Nature and peculiar Constitution.