1. Man had nothing to give. What was there he could call his own,
is finite, for whatsoever is in a finite creature is finite; its effects therefore cannot be of an infinite value.
(1.) Man could not effect it by offering something to God, or by doing something equivalent to the offence.
1. Man had nothing to give. What was there he could call his own, since he was a creature, especially since as an offender he had forfeited what was his by right of creation? Had man the world to give? How came he by it? Was it created by him or for him? If not by him, it was none of his own; he was but a steward to manage all for the use of his Lord and true proprietor. Can a steward recompense his lord for the wrong done to his honour, by offering to his master those goods which are his own already, and which the steward was only entrusted with? The world was none of man's to give; he never had it as an absolute lord by right of an independent propriety, nor was it possible he should, since he was not either the creator or preserver of it; and neither man, nor any other creature in the world, could possibly be brought into a state independent on God, so that man held as a feudatory in capite of God. But suppose it had been his own, he had forfeited all by his rebellion; for his sake, for his sin, the earth was cursed by the sovereign Lord of it, Gen. 3:17; and a thing cursed in all the parts of it could not be fit for an oblation to the divine Majesty.
2. Nor could his repentance be a compensation. Bare grief for an offence is not a compensation for an injury done to man, much less for an affront of so high a nature offered to God. But we find no such thing in man at the time wherein he fell from the top of his felicity to the gulf of misery. If he who had a sense of the happy state he had lost, and the miserable condition he had contracted, was more for excuses than relentings, how can a penitent posture be found by nature in any of his descendants? Gen. 3:9–13. If there were any blushes in him, they were occasioned more by the discovery of his crime than by the sense of the crime itself; and he was troubled more at his loss than at his offence, and so might relent that he was