GOD at first made Man upright, or as the sacred Pen-man expresses it, In the Image of GOD made he Man, that is, his Soul was the very Copy, the Transcript of the Divine Nature.—He that before had by his Almighty Fiat spoke the World into Being, breathed into Man the Breath of spiritual Life, and his Soul became adorned with all the Perfections of the Deity,—This was the finish|ing Stroke of the Creation: The Perfection both of the moral and material World,—and so near resembled its Divine Original, that GOD could not but rejoyce, and take Pleasure in his own Likeness—And therefore we read, that when GOD had finished the inanimate and brutish Part of the Creation, he looked upon it, and be|hold it was Good; but when that lovely God-like Crea|ture, Man, was made, behold it was very Good.Happy then, unspeakably happy must Man needs be, who was thus Partaker of the Divine Nature; and thus might we have still continued, had he still continued Holy. But GOD had placed him in a State of Probation, with a free Grant to eat of every Tree in the Garden of Eden, except the Tree of Knowlege of Good and Evil.—The Day he did eat thereof he was surely to die; that is, not only to be subject to temporal, but spiritual Death, and consequently to lose that Divine Image, that spiritual Life GOD had not long since breathed into him, and which was as much his Happiness as his Glory.These, one would imagine, were easy Conditions for a finite Creature's Happiness to depend on. But Man, unhappy Man, being seduced by the Devil, and desiring like him, to be equal with his Maker, eat of the forbidden Fruit, and thereby became liable to that Curse which the Eternal GOD, who cannot lie, had denounced against his Disobedience.Accordingly we read, that soon after Adam had fallen, he complained that he was naked.—Naked not only as 0