The doctrine of the covenant of redemption. Wherein is laid the foundation of all…

3. That the object of this Decree was Ens possibile, a possible Being. All Beings are either the first, or from the first. The first Being can be but one, and that is God. He only enjoyed a never Beginning Eternity; all other are the offspring of time, before which they had no Existence: and because they were to be from him, not by any necessity, but by a voluntary act, hence, God being a Cause by Counsel in all his free and transient acts, there must a Purpose pass with him in order to their Being: Antecedent to which purpose, in our conceptions, there could be no other consideration of the thing but as a mere possibility ⟨p. 39⟩for it was by virtue of this purpose that it Past into a Futurition.

3. That the object of this Decree was Ens possibile, a possible Being. All Beings are either the first, or from the first. The first Being can be but one, and that is God. He only enjoyed a never Beginning Eternity; all other are the ofspring of time, before which they had no Existence: and because they were to be from him, not by any necessity, but by a voluntary act, hence, God being a Cause by Counsel in all his free and transient acts, there must a Purpose pass with him in order to their Being: Antecedent to which purpose, in our conceptions, there could be no other consideration of the thing but as a meer possibility ⟨p. 39⟩for it was by vertue of this purpose that it Past into a Futurition.

4 All therefore that concerns this possible being in order to its rea••ing the designed end, belongs to the means. Hitherto, in respect of the Subject under our present consideration, viz. man, […]; His Creation; the state of integrity in which he was made; the Covenant of wo•ks which God put him under; the permission of […] Apostasy by which he fell under the Curse of that Covenant, and so came to stand in need of Redemption. Either these things belongs to the Decree, or else there was no Decree about them; and so they fell out besides Gods intention; or else we must assign two Decrees to God, and so two ends, and two orders, of Media respecting the same Subject; and so we must suppose that God lost his end in the First, which put him upon a new contrivance in the latter. How unbecoming it is to entertain such conceptions about the great God, let any Christian Judg. If then they appertain to the Decree, it must be either to the end or the means: not to the end, for that is the glory of Grace, which is not the things themselves, but that which Results from them: they then are […] steps to it, and so must be of the means.