time after; but it is but a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection
are like the swaddling clothes they art wrapt up in, and supported by, in
the weakness of their infancy: age and reason as they grow up, loosen
them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free
disposal.
Sec. 56. Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full
possession of their strength and reason, and so was capable, from the
first instant of his being to provide for his own support and
preservation, and govern his actions according to the dictates of the law
of reason which God had implanted in him. From him the world is peopled
with his descendants, who are all born infants, weak and helpless,
without knowledge or understanding: but to supply the defects of this
imperfect state, till the improvement of growth and age hath removed
them, Adam and Eve, and after them all parents were, by the law of
nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the
children they had begotten; not as their own workmanship, but the
workmanship of their own maker, the Almighty, to whom they were to be
accountable for them.
Sec. 57. The law, that was to govern Adam, was the same that was to
govern all his posterity, the law of reason. But his offspring having
another way of entrance into the world, different from him, by a natural
birth, that produced them ignorant and without the use of reason, they
were not presently under that law; for no body can be under a law, which
is not promulgated to him; and this law being promulgated or made known
by reason only, he that is not come to the use of his reason, cannot be
said to be under this law; and Adam's children, being not presently as
soon as born under this law of reason, were not presently free: for law,
in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a
free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and prescribes no
farther than is for the general good of those under that law: could they