II. As happiness is the sole end of all our labours, so this revelation aims at nothing else.
It gives us right notions of ourselves, of our true good and real evil; it shews us our true condition, both our greatness and meanness, our happiness and misery.
*Before this, man was a mere riddle to himself, and his condition full of darkness and perplexity; a restless inhabitant of a miserable disordered world, walking in a vain shadow and disquieting himself in vain.
*But this light has dispersed the anxiety of his vain conjectures. It has, by adding heaven to earth, and eternity to time, opened such a glorious view of things, as leads men, even in this world, to a peace of God which passeth all understanding.
III. *This revelation acquaints us, that we have a spirit within us, which was created after the divine image; that this spirit is now in a fallen condition; that the body in which it is placed is its sepulchre, where it is enslaved to fleshly thoughts, blinded with false notions of good and evil, and dead to all taste of its true happiness.
It teaches us, that the world in which we live, is also in a disordered, irregular state, and cursed for the sake of man; that it is no longer the paradise that God made it, but the remains of a drowned world, full of marks of God’s displeasure, and the sin of its inhabitants.
That it is a mere wilderness, a state of darkness, a vale of misery, where vice and madness, dreams and shadows, variously please and torment the short, miserable lives of men.
Devils also, and evil spirits have here their residence, promoting the works of darkness, and wandering up and down, seeking whom they may devour.
So that man, in his natural state, is like a person sick of variety of diseases, knowing neither his distemper nor his cure, and inclosed in a place where he can hear or see, or feel, or taste of nothing but what tends to enflame his disorders.
IV. *But Christianity puts an end to this state of things, blots out all the ideas of worldly wisdom, brings the world itself to ashes, and creates all anew. It calls man from an animal life and earthly societies, to be born again of the Holy Ghost, and be made a member of the kingdom of God.