The scriptures abound with proof of this. What can be more decisive than the following words? _If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. If Christ be not in you, ye are reprobates._ And must not this be equally true of every man in the world? As true of all men in the patriarchal as in the gospel ages? _If any man_, says the apostle; therefore no regard is had to time or place, but where there is _any man_, there this truth is affirmed of him by the apostle, that unless he hath the Spirit of Christ he is none of his, but is a reprobate. But if none can be Christ’s, but because they have his Spirit living in them, and none can be God’s, but because they are Christ’s, it follows that if Christ was not the Spirit and power of _that_ first, universal covenant made by God with fallen _Adam_, if he was not that which was meant by the _seed of the woman_, if his Spirit was not from that time the real bruiser of the serpent’s head, both _Adam_, and all his posterity, for much more than three thousand years lived and died mere reprobates, and that, by an unavoidable necessity, because they had not the Spirit of Christ living in them. And now, my Lord, I think I have sufficiently proved not only my two propositions, but also that the first covenant with _Adam_, by the seed of the woman, was the one Christian means of salvation, so wonderfully manifested by the whole process of Christ revealed in the gospel. Therefore it is a truth of the utmost certainty, that from the beginning of the world to the end of it, there never was, nor ever will be any more, or any other, but one and the same true religion of the gospel, which began with _Adam_ and _Eve_ thro’ Jesus Christ, the one mediator and reconciler of God to man, who was as certainly the life, strength, and salvation of the faithful in the old world, as he was in after-times, when the Son of the Virgin _Mary, the way, the truth, and the life_, to all that have faith in him. And indeed a plurality of religions, or means of salvation, is as gross an imagination as a plurality of gods, and can subsist upon no other foundation. A better religion necessarily supposes a better God, and a change in religion a change in that God that makes it. A partial God, with-holding the _one true power_ of salvation, till the last ages of the world, is as atheistical as _Epicurus_’s god. In sundry times, and in divers manners, it may please the wisdom of God, to vary that which is only an outward help to the truth of religion; but the inward spirit and truth of salvation, is as unvariable as God himself.