Third, of Total Depravity.
Fourth, of Inability.
These points are fully stated in the following passage from the “Assembly's Confession of Faith,” chap. 6:—
“1. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtlety and temptation of Satan, sinned in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit; having purposed to order it to his own glory.
“2. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness, and communion with God; and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.
“3. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveyed, to all their posterity, descending from them by ordinary generation.
“4. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.
“5. This corruption of nature during this life doth remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be, through Christ, pardoned and mortified, yet both itself and all the motions thereof are truly and properly sin.
“6. Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression [pg 132] of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, doth in its own nature bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God and curse of the law, and so made subject to death, with all miseries, spiritual, temporal, and eternal.”[13]
We assume the “Assembly's Catechism” as almost the standard of Orthodoxy. It was prepared with the concurrence of the best minds in England, in an age when theological discussion had sharpened all wits in that direction. Thoroughly Calvinistic, it is also a wonderfully clear and precise statement of Calvinism. Framed after long controversies, it had the advantage of all the distinctions which are made only during controversy. It is a fortress made defensible [pg 133] at all points, because it has been attacked so often that all its weak places have been seen and marked. It is a masterpiece of statement.