3. It is of the highest importance to the system of Christianity, to maintain the doctrine of human guilt and depravity, because it is such an advantageous foil to set forth the unbounded love and glorious redemption of the Lord Jesus Christ; which, without an acknowledgment of the apostacy of man, must of course be reputed a solemn redundancy, if not an absolute nonentity. And it always happens, that they who deny the fall reject some of the capital doctrines of revelation, that are concomitant with it, and are generally convicted of entertaining low and blasphemous thoughts concerning the person and salvation of the Son of God. But as we take for granted, that that original sin, which some have dared, in derision, to call original nonsense, is a most melancholy and humiliating matter of fact, we assert, that the only person qualified for rescuing man from the consequences of that depraved and helpless condition into which he was plunged by sin, was the eternal Son of God. Of him we believe, that his qualifications for the high office of Mediator between God and man depend entirely upon the truth of his divinity; that when the scriptures call Jesus God, they give him that divine title in the proper sense of the word; that he is, as Mediator, subordinate and delegated, and sent; but not, as _God_. We believe the inspired writers continually mean to represent him, under that name of divinity, as one with the Father in the essence of the Godhead, because he claims all the other incommunicable attributes peculiar to it; such as omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternity of existence a _parte ante_, &c. We cannot conceive that Jehovah would be the infringer of his own law, in commanding “all the angels of God to worship” the Son, Heb. i. 6, if the Son were not by nature God; since a subordinate Deity, as an object of inferior adoration, is an idea expressly repugnant to the very letter of that law, which enjoins the worship of one God, and condemns the translation of it to any other being: and to worship any creature, whether a seraph or a quadruped, whether angelic or superangelic, is idolatry; that since the great Lawgiver could never intend to violate his own law, which is as unchangeable as his own nature, in commanding homage to be paid to the Messiah, he meant to proclaim to all the earth, that “in him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, παν το πληρωμα της θεοτητος σωματικως” Col. ii. 9.