passionate doctrine of the sincere and extensive offers of mercy to every sinner, according to the degree of the discoveries of the grace of God in the age and nation wherein he lives we shall acquire a more large, more generous and diffusive benevolence to all our fellow-creatures of the race of Adam: We shall give a large foundation for hope to every guilty creature among inankind, assuring them that the great God hath debarred none from his mercy but those who debar themselves by impenitence and unbelief. We shall vindicate the goodness and justice of God in his dispensations towards men, and leave the final condemnation of wilful impenitents, and of all the wicked of the earth, entirely upon their own heads. If it be enquired, what farther advantages can be derived from so peculiar a doctrine as this last section contains, viz. that the children of unregenerate or unholy parents, who never lived to do good or evil, and died only under the guilt of Adam's sin, have sustained their whole penalty at death, and will never be raised to life again? I answer, in these three particulars;

I. Hereby the conduct of divine providence, with regard to the millions of infant creatures in all the numerous nations of the earth, will be justified from the severe censures which have been cast upon it by men in accusing the doctrine of original sin: For if they suffer nothing but temporal death, as being fallen in Adam their head, all these terrors of pretended cruelty and severity will vanish, while it appears that eternal damnation belongs only to those who have been guilty of actual transgression in their own persons; for there is not one word in all the scripture concerning eternal misery inflicted upon any person merely for the sin of Adam.

II. This hypothesis not only absolves the providence of God from supposed crucity, but perhaps it represents it as good and gracious towards far the greatest part of those that are born of Adam; while they are not suffered to live and grow up amidst the temptations of this world, and under their present corrupt principles of nature, but are precluded from rendering themselves more miserable, by being cut off in infancy, and never having it in their power to do good or evil themselves.

III. This scheme relieves the difficulties which sometimes have been cast upon the laws or orders of God given the Jewish nation, to cut off so many thousand children of the Canaanites when they entered into the promised land: For hereby these children are subjected only to temporal death as the consequent and penalty of Adam's sin, and are, if I may so express it, secured from eternal misery, by being prevented from growing up to imitate the iniquities of their fathers, and to expose themselves to God's eternal judgment and damnation. If some person should again object, why then may not men slay their own

infants or any other children out of kindness, to prevent their growing up to commit actual sins, and exposing themselves to a resurrection and judgment and everlasting misery? I answer these two ways:

I. Because this is directly contrary to the moral law whereby God hath appointed to govern man, viz. thou shalt not kill; and and the laws of men, as well as the law of God, almost universally forbid all murder of the human race, and require blood for blood. It is God's prerogative to cut off by death whom he pleases, but he hath not given this prerogative to man, nor will he break in upon the grand rule of his government of this world, so far as to give this piece of sovereignty out of his own hand.

II. Because if men might slay any children at their own pleasure, they might slay some who would have grown up to virtue and religion, and then this infant murder would cut these children off from future and eternal happiness, which would have been very unjust, and which God will never permit. Upon the whole it is evident, that the scripture having never in any text that I can find foretold the resurrection or judgment of the infants of sinful parents, and having pronounced the word death only, as the penalty of Adam's sin or their interest in it, and denounced the final judgment and eternal misery only against actual sinners; there is abundant reason to believe that God has knowingly and wisely appointed and ordered all these things, so that his providence might be secure from all charges of cruelty and injustice: And perhaps this hypothesis which I have here proposed, is nothing else but these very appointments and transactions of God set in their proper scriptural light to guard his providence from censure.

If I have failed in these attempts, let it be remembered that all the new or peculiar sentiments which are found here, are merely offered to the world as probable conjectures drawn from reason and scripture, to relieve the difficulties which seem to hang on revealed truths. If the method proposed is not sufficient for this purpose, I shall rejoice to see better solutions of them given, and to behold them set in a fairer light. Where I have laboured to follow the track of reason, it hath only been in order to do more abundant honour to divine revelation, to which I entirely submit my faith and practice; and I solemnly renounce whatsoever is inconsistent with it, for that cannot be right reason. And let us remember also, that if all our attempts of this kind should fail, yet we may rest assured of this, that God is ever wise and righteous and good, that all his transactions with men, how intricate and repugnant soever they may seeni to us, are highly consistent in his own view, and harmonize with all his own perfections: We may be assured that we are sinful

and unhappy creatures in ourselves, that there is an all-sufficient salvation provided through Jesus Christ the Son of God, and that every one shall certainly be a joyful partaker of it, who follows the appointed methods of divine grace. True repentance and a sincere return to God, with faith in his mercy, so far as it is discovered to men under every dispensation, and a persevering life of holiness in the love of God and our neighbour, shall not fail of being crowned at last with the favour of God and eternal life through the mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord: And whatsoever clouds of ignorance and darkness may continue to surround us here, while we are studying the mysteries of grace or providence, yet we shall see things hereafter in a divine light, where all difficulties and darkness shall vanish for ever.

THREE ESSAYS

ADDED BY WAY OF

APPENDIX:

Wherein are contained some plain Representations of important Points relating to the foregoing Questions.

FIRST ESSAY.

A Debate, whether the present Miseries of Man alone will prove his Apostacy from God?

SECT. I.-The Follies and Miseries of Mankind in a general Survey,

THE miseries and follies of the creature man have been an ancient and endless subject of declamation among the writers of the heathen world, as well as among christians. A just survey of human nature, from its entrance into life, till its retirement from this visible world behind the curtain of death, would furnish us with abundant matter of sorrow and complaint; and we should be ready to say concerning man, Is this the creature that is so superior to the rest of the inhabitants of this globe, as to require such peculiar care of the Creator in forming him? Is this the animal furnished with such transcendent powers of thought and reason, whereby he is said to be exalted above brute animals? Does he deserve such an illustrious description as Ovid gives of him, after he had described the formation of beasts, birds and fishes

"Sanctius his animal, mentisque capacius altæ
Deerat adhuc, & quod dominari in cætera posset,
Natus homo est. Sive hunc divino semine cretuin
Ile opifex rerum, mundi melioris origo,
Finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum:
Pronaque cum spectent animalia cætera terram
Os homini sublime dedit, cœlumque tueri
Jussit, & erectos ad sidera tollere vultus."
Thus in English:

"A creature of a more exalted kind,
Was wanting yet, and then was man designed;
Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast,
For empire form'd, and fit to rule the rest.

Whether with particles of heavenly fire
The God of nature did his soul inspire,
And borrowing from our earth, on that blest day,
Our new-made earth, a better sort of clay,
And moulding up the mass in shape like ours,
Form'd a bright image of th' all-ruling powers.
Whilst all the mute creation downwards bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft; and with erected eyes
Beholds his own hereditary skies.”

One would almost imagine this heathen poet had read the account which Moses the Jewish historian gives of the original formation of man; Gen. i. 26. And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish, and the foul, and the cattle. And chapter ii. 7. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul. If man was formed in the image of God, certainly he was a holy and a happy being; but what is there like holiness or happiness now found running through the rank of creatures that is called by the name of MAN ? Are there any of the brutal kind that do not more regularly answer the design of their creation, and act more agreeably to their nature, than this illustrious thing MAN, that was made to govern them all? Are there any of the brutes of the land, the water or the air, that we ever find acting so much below their original character as mankind does? And are there any tribes amongst them, through which pain, vexation and misery are so plentifully distributed as among the sons and daughters of the first man?

This globe of earth, if it were to be surveyed by some spirit, some immortal being of the superior regions, and ransacked through all the dimensions and corners of it which are inhabited by our species of creatures, it would be found such a theatre of folly and madness, such a maze of mingled vice and misery, as would move the compassion of his refined nature to a painful degree, and almost sink it into sympathy and sorrow, if it were not tempered and restrained by a clear sight of the just and wise conduct of providence, in permitting all this mischief. But if all these wide and dismal scenes could be grasped in one view, by any mortal of a tender and compassionate make, perhaps it would agonize his better powers into confusion and phrenzy. Should the poets or philosophers form a just idea of it, as far as our common capacities extend, there would be criminal and absurd matter enough to furnish a Horace or a Juvenal with a thousand jests and sarcasms on their own spécies, or rather with a thousand full satires. There would be follies enough to shake the lungs of a thousand Democrituses with endless laughter, and there would be miseries enough to raise a fountain of tears for each single Heraclitus, if such a one had lived in