That it seems contrary to the common and natural conceptions of all
mankind, who acknowledge themselves able and sufficient to do many
things which actually they never do.
2. That to assert that God looked upon Adam's fall as a sin, and
punished it as such when, without any antecedent sin of his, he
withdrew that actual grace from him upon the withdrawing of which
it was impossible for him not to fall, seems a thing that highly
reproaches the essential equity and goodness of the divine nature.
Wherefore, doubtless the will of man in the state of innocence had an
entire freedom, a perfect equipendency and indifference to either part
of the contradiction, to stand, or not to stand; to accept, or not to
accept the temptation. I will grant the will of man now to be as much
a slave as any one who will have it, and be only free to sin; that is,
instead of a liberty, to have only a licentiousness; yet certainly
this is not nature, but chance. We were not born crooked; we learned
these windings and turnings of the serpent: and therefore it can not
but be a blasphemous piece of ingratitude to ascribe them to God, and
to make the plague of our nature the condition of our creation.
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