An answer to the discourse of Mr. William Sherlock, touching the knowledge of Christ,…

Thus when they talk of our spiritual impotency and inability to do any good thing, ¹they prove it wonderfully from our being dead in trespasses and sins; therefore as a dead man can contribute nothing to his own Resurrection, no more ⟨p. 124⟩can we towards our Conversion: Which is true of Natural death, but will be hard to prove of a Moral death, which consists in the prevalency of vicious habits contracted by long custom (which was the case of the Heathen, whom the Apostle there speaks of) which do enslave the Will, that it is very difficult, though not impossible for such persons to return to the love and practice of Virtue.

1. 1Mr. Sherlock.

Every man,¹ who is acquainted with himself, may learn his own impotency to good, from the inward pressure of corruption which is in him: However the Apostle in that 2. to the Ephesians doth notably decipher it out to us; there he speaks not so much of a spiritual Death in actual customary sins, as of such a Death in Original corruption; for he opposes it to quickening Grace which by divine Principles infused heals the same; and a little after tells us, that we are by nature the children of wrath. Hoc uno verbo, quasi fulmine, totus homo, quantus quantus est, prosternitur, saith Beza on the place: this shows him dead indeed. It's true the Pelagians,² as St. Austin tells us, would have omitted the word, Nature, and in stead thereof have read, Prorsùs, altogether children of wrath, but the ⟨p. 125⟩Church would not suffer it. This spiritual Death in Sin is a total one, it runs over all the Soul; there are, saith the Apostle lusts or desires of the Flesh, the sensitive Faculties, and of the Mind, the rational Powers; nothing is left in Man but what is dead in sin, not a drop or a spark of Spiritual Life or true Grace: For then a man should be naturally regenerate and under a Promise of that Evangelical Mercy, which is indulged to the least measure of Grace, though it be but as a smoking flax or bruised reed. Man is wholly void of spiritual Life by Nature, and hence it evidently appears, that he is not able to reach so high as any spiritual Act, such as Conversion is, unless he be elevated above his own Line by supernatural Grace: This is fully the Doctrine of our Church, who tells us, Man of his own nature is fleshly,