SERMON I.
UPON HUMAN NATURE.
ROMANS xii. 4, 5.



For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not
the same office: so we, being many, are one body in Christ, and
every one members one of another.

The Epistles in the New Testament have all of them a particular
reference to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the
time they were written. Therefore as they cannot be thoroughly
understood unless that condition and those usages are known and
attended to, so, further, though they be known, yet if they be
discontinued or changed, exhortations, precepts, and illustrations
of things, which refer to such circumstances now ceased or altered,
cannot at this time be urged in that manner and with that force
which they were to the primitive Christians. Thus the text now
before us, in its first intent and design, relates to the decent
management of those extraordinary gifts which were then in the
Church, {1} but which are now totally ceased. And even as to the
allusion that "we are one body in Christ," though what the apostle
here intends is equally true of Christians in all circumstances, and
the consideration of it is plainly still an additional motive, over
and above moral considerations, to the discharge of the several
duties and offices of a Christian, yet it is manifest this allusion