The bonds of this
subjection are like the swaddling clothes they are 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.
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 instance of his being to provide for his own support and
preservation, and govern his actions according to the dictates of
the law of reason 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
had 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.
57. The law that was to govern Adam was the same that was to
govern all his posterity, the law of reason.
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