Cap. VII §6: Breve compendium — causes yes, modes and merit-respect no

What is weaker than the foregoing arguments for the imputation of Adam's sin, especially the immediate? Yet their author praises them, and, that they may be repeated without the reader's disgust, reduces them into a short compendium. Causes are compared, he says; the effects of the causes are compared; the modes of the effects are compared. The causes, namely Christ and Adam, are compared because each has the same respect and relation to those effects which they produce in men — namely the respect of merit; because each produces not only by any efficiency whatever, or however named, but by meritorious efficiency — the one justification, the other condemnation. That causes and the effects of causes are compared I confess; I deny the modes of the effects. I deny that each cause has the same respect to those effects which they produce in men: for they have rather a diverse. For the one produces its effect by nature, the other by grace; that by carnal generation, this by free gift; that by propagating into us inhering sin which merits condemnation, this by remitting to us that inhering sin; that has a relation to only one sin and guilt, this to all the guilts of all our sins. How then will it be demonstrated that the respect of each is the same, and that of merit? Christ merited for us remission of sins. For he paid our debts. He satisfied Divine Justice in our place. He suffered the death which we had deserved, and, as the Apostle speaks, was made sin for us, that we might be the righteousness of God in him. He freely gave us his own merit: we receive it offered through faith. This was the Father's mind, this the Son's, this the will, this the counsel, this the aim. Scripture everywhere inculcates it. Does it say such a thing of Adam? Did he want by that disobedience of his to merit death for us? Did he sin in our place? Did he give us that merit of his? Do we receive it through some act of our mind or will? How then is each said to have the same respect, the same relation? Or if an inhering vice sufficient for our being damned was propagated into us from Adam, does it follow that an inhering righteousness sufficient for our being justified was propagated into us from Christ? Yet let those who oppose us in this cause see, I ask, whether this cannot be gathered from D. Garissoles's Arguments equally with the antecedent imputation of Adam's sin. Therefore however great a likeness of merit — not now identity — be said to be between each cause, it must be tightly held that in the mode of communicating merit no small unlikeness ought to be observed.