commands men to call upon him in the time of trouble (Ps. 50:15), he gives this command to the soul, not to the lips. And it is the very same in every other case. Whosoever does not observe this necessary rule in reading the Scriptures, is blind indeed. He can never have a right apprehension of original sin, repentance, or regeneration: nay, he cannot attain to a sound knowledge of any one article of the Christian religion. 20. We have daily before our eyes the extreme wickedness of men, their horrid pride, savage hatred, barbarous enviousness, and other impious qualities, with which they tear one another, after the manner of wild beasts. Many are transported to such a degree of malice, as to be unconcerned about their own lives, provided they can but hurt or destroy another. Their neighbor must submit to their pleasure, or expect to have a snare laid for his ruin. Thus, as the devil himself is a “murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44); so he stirs up the soul of man to thirst after the blood of others. For all these inhuman qualities of the heart, this envy and wrath, this bitterness of mind, this rancor and malice, what are they but the seed of the devil sown in man, and his express image engraven upon the soul? Alas! how the devil has portrayed himself in man! 21. God had implanted in man a conjugal affection, that was pure and honorable; that thence children might be begotten after the divine image. Nor could there have been a love more holy and heavenly, than that by which man, in his blessed estate, would have thus propagated the image of God and mankind at the same time. All would have been for the glory of his Creator, and the salvation of man. Nay, if man in the state of innocency could have begotten a vast multitude of children, and have thus propagated the honor and image of God; nothing, certainly, could have been more grateful to him than this; nothing more delightful, more full of holy joy and satisfaction. For these acts would then have proceeded from pure love to God and to men, as so many images of the Supreme Good. As God found in the creation of man, a holy pleasure, and delighted in him, as in his image; so also man would, in like manner, have been sensible of a most pure and exquisite joy in the procreation of his like, for it would have been the propagation of God’s image. But, alas! Satan has polluted this chaste flame of conjugal love with all uncleanness. Men and women, actuated with a blind transport of lust, begot children _in their own_, not in God’s likeness. Gen. 5:3. How is the holy bond of matrimony trampled upon and profaned! How wholly defiled is it with spots of the flesh, and what a multitude of vices and impurities now shelter themselves under the sacred name of matrimony!