“By his act of delinquency and the sentence upon it, Adam stood attainted and became a dead man in law, though he was not executed till about nine hundred years afterwards.” Lawyer as Asgill was, and legally as he conducts his whole extraordinary argument, he yet offers a moral extenuation of Adam's offence. Eve after her eating and Adam before his eating, were, he says, in two different states, she in the state of Death, and he in the State of Life; and thereby his was much the harder case. For she by her very creation was so much a part of himself that he could not be happy while she was miserable. The loss of her happiness so much affected him by sympathy that all his other enjoyments could do him no good; and therefore since he thought it impossible for her to return into the same state with him, he chose, rather than be parted from her, to hazard himself in the same state with her. Asgill then resumes his legal view of the case: the offence he says was at last joint and several; the sentence fell upon Mankind as descendants from these our common ancestors, and so upon Christ himself. And this is the reason why in the genealogy of our Saviour as set down by two Evangelists his legal descent by Joseph is only counted upon, “because all legal descents are accounted from the father.” As he was born of a Virgin to preserve his nature from the defilement of humanity, so was he of a Virgin espoused to derive upon himself the curse of the Law by a legal father: for which purpose it was necessary that the birth of Christ should, in the terms of the Evangelist, be on this wise and no otherwise. And hence the Genealogy of Christ is a fundamental part of Eternal Life.
The reader will soon perceive that technically as Asgill treated his strange argument, he was sincerely and even religiously convinced of its importance and its truth. “Having shewn,” he proceeds, “how this Law fell upon Christ, it is next incumbent on me to shew that it is taken away by his death, and consequently that the long possession of Death over the World can be no longer a title against Life. But when I say this Law is taken away, I don't mean that the words of it are taken away; for they remain with us to this day and being matter of Record must remain for ever; but that it is satisfied by other matter of Record, by which the force of it is gone. Law satisfied is no Law, as a debt satisfied is no debt. Now the specific demand of the Law was Death; and of a man; and a man made under the Law. Christ qualified himself to be so: and as such suffered under it, thus undergoing the literal sentence. This he might have done and not have given the Law satisfaction, for millions of men before him had undergone it and yet the Law was nevertheless dissatisfied with them and others, but He declared It is finished before he gave up the ghost. By the dignity of his person he gave that satisfaction which it was impossible for mankind to give.”
For the Law, he argues, was not such a civil contract that the breach of it could be satisfied; it was a Law of Honour, the breach whereof required personal satisfaction for the greatest affront and the highest act of ingratitude to God, inasmuch as the slighter the thing demanded is, the greater is the affront in refusing it. “Man by his very creation entered into the labours of the Creator and became Lord of the Universe which was adapted to his enjoyments. God left him in possession of it upon his parole of honour, only that he would acknowledge it to be held of Him, and as the token of this tenure that he would only forbear from eating of one tree, withal telling him that if he did eat of it, his life should go for it. If man had had more than his life to give, God would have had it of him. This was rather a resentment of the affront, than any satisfaction for it; and therefore to signify the height of this resentment God raises man from the dead to demand further satisfaction from him. Death is a commitment to the prison of the Grave till the Judgement of the Great Day; and then the grand Habeas Corpus will issue to the Earth and to the Sea, to give up their dead: to remove the Bodies, with the cause of their commitment.
“Yet was this a resentment without malice; for as God maintained his resentment under all his love, so He maintained his love under all his resentment. For his love being a love of kindness flowing from his own nature, could not be diminished by any act of man; and yet his honour being concerned to maintain the truth of his word, he could not falsify that to gratify his own affection. And thus he bore the passion of his own love, till he had found out a salvo for his honour by that Son of Man who gave him satisfaction at once by the dignity of his person. Personal satisfactions by the Laws of Honour are esteemed sufficient or not, according to the equality or inequality between the persons who give or take the affront. Therefore God to vindicate his honour was obliged to find out a person for this purpose equal to Himself: the invention of which is called the manifold wisdom of God, the invention itself being the highest expression of the deepest love, and the execution of it, in the death of Christ, the deepest resentment of the highest affront.
“Now inasmuch as the person of our Saviour was superior to the human nature, so much the satisfaction by his death surmounted the offence. He died under the Law but he did not arise under it, having taken it away by his death. The life regained by him in his resurrection was by Conquest, by which, according to all the Laws of Conquest, the Law of Death is taken away. For by the Laws of Conquest the Laws of the conquered are ipso facto taken away, and all records and writings that remain of them are of no more force than waste paper. Hence the title of Christ to Eternal Life is become absolute,—by absolute”—says this theologo-jurist,—“I mean discharged from all tenure or condition, and consequently from all forfeiture. And as his title to life is thus become absolute by Conquest, so the direction of it is become eternal by being annexed to the Person of the Godhead: thus Christ ever since his resurrection did, and doth, stand seized of an absolute and indefeazable Estate of Eternal Life, without any tenure or condition or other matter or thing to change or determine it for ever.” “I had reason” says Asgill “thus to assert the title of Christ at large; because this is the title by and under which I am going to affirm my argument and to claim Eternal Life for myself and all the world.”
“And first I put it upon the Profession of Divinity to deny one word of the fact as I have repeated it. Next I challenge the Science of the Law to shew such another Title as this is. And then I defy the Logicians to deny my Argument: of which this is the abstract: That the Law delivered to Adam before the Fall is the original cause of Death in the World: That this Law is taken away by the Death of Christ: That therefore the legal power of death is gone. And I am so far from thinking this Covenant of Eternal Life to be an allusion to the forms of Title amongst men, that I rather adore it as the precedent for them all; believing with that great Apostle that the things on Earth are but the patterns of things in the Heavens where the Originals are kept.” This he says because he has before made it appear that in the Covenant of Eternal Life all things requisite to constitute a legal instrument are found, to wit, the date, the parties, the contents, and consideration, the sealing, and execution, the witnesses, and the Ceremony required of Man, whereby to execute it on his part and take the advantage of it.
By the sacrifice which our Lord offered of himself, this technical but sincere and serious enthusiast argues, more than an atonement was made. “And that this superabundancy might not run to waste, God declared that Man should have Eternal Life absolute as Christ himself had it; and hence Eternal Life is called the Gift of God through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, over and above our redemption. Why then,” he asks, “doth Death remain in the World? Why because Man knows not the Way of Life—‘the way of Life they have not known.’ Because our faith is not yet come to us—‘when the Son of Man comes shall he find faith upon the earth?’ Because Man is a beast of burden that knows not his own strength in the virtue of the Death and the power of the Resurrection of Christ. Unbelief goes not by reason or dint of argument, but is a sort of melancholy madness, by which if we once fancy ourselves bound, it hath the same effect upon us as if we really were so. Death is like Satan, who appears to none but those who are afraid of him: Resist the Devil and he will flee from you. Because Death had once dominion over us, we think it hath and must have it still. And this I find within myself, that though I can't deny one word I have said in fact or argument, yet I can't maintain my belief of it without making it more familiar to my understanding, by turning it up and down in my thoughts and ruminating upon some proceedings already made upon it in the World.
“The Motto of the Religion of the World is Mors Janua Vitæ; if we mean by this the Death of Christ, we are in the right; but if we mean our own Death then we are in the wrong. Far be it from me to say that Man may not attain to Eternal Life, though he should die; for the Text runs double. ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that liveth and believeth on me, shall never die; and though he were dead he shall live.’ This very Text shows that there is a nearer way of entering into Eternal Life than by the way of Death and Resurrection. Whatever circumstances a man is under at the time of his death, God is bound to make good this Text to him, according to which part of it he builds his faith upon; if he be dead there's a necessity for a resurrection; but if he be alive there's no occasion for Death or Resurrection either. This text doth not maintain two religions, but two articles of faith in the same religion, and the article of faith for a present life without dying is the higher of the two.
“No man can comprehend the heights and depths of the Gospel at his first entrance into it; and in point of order, ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is Death.’ The first essay of Faith is against Hell, that though we die we may not be damned; and the full assurance of this is more than most men attain to before Death overtakes them, which makes Death a terror to men. But they who attain it can sing a requiem ‘Lord now lettest thou thy Servant depart in peace!’ and if God takes them at their word, they lie down in the faith of the Resurrection of the Just. But whenever he pleases to continue them, after that attainment, much longer above ground, that time seems to them an interval of perfect leisure, till at last espying Death itself, they fall upon it as an enemy that must be conquered, one time or other, through faith in Christ. This is the reason why it seems intended that a respite of time should be allotted to believers after the first Resurrection and before the dissolution of the World, for perfecting that faith which they began before their death but could not attain to in the first reach of life: for Death being but a discontinuance of Life, wherever men leave off at their death, they must begin at their resurrection. Nor shall they ascend after their resurrection, till they have attained to this faith of translation, and by that very faith they shall be then convinced that they need not have died.
“When Elijah courted death under the juniper tree in the wilderness, and ‘said—now Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers,’ that request shews that he was not educated in this faith of translation, but attained it afterwards by study. Paul tells ‘we shall not all die but we shall all be changed;’ yet though he delivered this to be his faith in general, he did not attain to such a particular knowledge of the way and manner of it as to prevent his own death: he tells us he had not yet attained the Resurrection of the dead, but was pressing after it. He had but a late conversion, and was detained in the study of another part of divinity, the confirming the New Testament by the Old and making them answer one another,—a point previous to the faith of translation, and which must be learned before it—in order to it. But this his pressing (though he did not attain,) hath much encouraged me,” says Asgill, “to make this enquiry, being well assured that he would not have thus pursued it, had he not apprehended more in it than the vulgar opinion.