as if it were not enough frequently to corrupt the atmosphere by pestilential vapours, borrows the assistance of the devouring element, to terrify and Scourge her guilty children. By sudden frightful chasms, and the mouth of her burning mountains, she vomits clouds of smoke, sulphureous flames, and calcined rocks; she emits streams of melted minerals, covers the adjacent plains with boiling, fiery lavas: and, as if she wanted to ease herself of the burden of her inhabitants, suddenly rises against them, and at once crushes, destroys, and buries them in heaps of ruins.

These astonishing scenes, like a bloody battle that is seen at a distance, may indeed entertain us: they amuse our imagination, when in a peaceful apartment, we behold them beautifully represented by the pen of a Virgil, or the pencil of a Raphael. But to be in the midst of them, as thousands are sooner or later, is inexpressibly dreadful: it is actually to see the forerunners of divine vengeance, and hear the shaking of God's destructive rod : it is to behold at once a lively emblem, and an awful pledge of that fire and brimstone, storm and tempest, which the righteous Governor of the world

will rain upon the ungodly; "when the heavens shall pass away with a

great noise, the elements shall melt with fervent heat, and the earth, with all the works that are therein, shall be burnt up."

Now as reason loudly declares, that the God of order, justice, and goodness, could never establish and continue this fearful course of things, but to punish the disorders of the moral world by those of the natural: we must conclude that man is guilty, from the alarming tokens of divine displeasure, which sooner or later are so conspicuous in every part of the habitable globe.

SECOND ARGUMENT.

We have taken a view of the residence of mankind; let us now behold then entering upon the disordered scene. And here reason informs us, that some mystery of iniquity lies hid under the loathsome, painful, and frequently mortal circumstances, which accompany their birth. For it can never be imagined, that a righteous and good God, would suffer innocent and pure creatures, to come into the world skilled in no language, but that of misery, venting itself in bitter cries, or doleful accents.

It is a matter of fact, that infants generally return their first breath with a groan, and salute the light with the voice of sorrow: generally, I say,for sometimes they are born half-dead, and cannot, without the utmost difficulty, be brought to breathe and groan. But all are born at the hazard of their lives; for, while some cannot press into the land of the living, without being dangerously bruised; others have their tender bones dislocated. Some are almost strangled: and it is the horrible fate of others, to be forced into the world by instruments of torture: having their skull bored, through or broken to pieces, or their quivering limbs cut or torn off from the unfortunate trunk. Again,

While some appear on the stage of life embarrassed with superfluous parts, others unaccountably mutilated, want those which are necessary: and what is more terrible still, a few, whose hideous, mis-shapen bodies, seem calculated to represent the deformity of a fallen soul, rank among frightful monsters; and to terminate the horror of the parents, are actually smothered and destroyed.

The spectators, it is true, concerned for the honour of mankind, frequently draw a veil over these shocking and bloody scenes; but a philosopher will find them out, and will rationally infer, that the deplorable and dangerous manner in which mankind are born, proves them to be degenerate, fallen creatures*.

*

Logicians will excuse the author if he prefers the common unaffected

THIRD ARGUMENT.

Ir we let our thoughts ascend, from the little sufferers to the mothers that bear them; we shall find another dreadful proof of the divine displeasure, and of our natural depravity. Does not a good master, much more a gracious God, delight in the prosperity and happiness of his faithful servants? If mankind were naturally in their Creator's favour, would he not order the fruit of the womb to drop from it, without any more inconveniency, than ripe vegetables fall from the opening husk, or full-grown fruit from the disburthened tree? But how widely different is the case!

Fix your attention on pregnant mothers: See their disquietude and fears. Some go before-hand through an imaginary travail, almost as painful to the mind, as the real labour is to the body. The dreaded hour comes at last. Good God! What lingering, what tearing pains; what redoubled throes, what killing agonies attend it! See the curse; or rather, see it not. Let the daughter of her, who tasted the forbidden fruit without the man, drink that bitter cup without him. Fly from the mournful scene, fly to distant apartments:—But in vain :-The din of sorrow pursues and overtakes you

there.

A child of man is at the point of being born; his tortured mother proclaims the news in the bitterest accents. They increase with her increasing agony. Sympathize and pray, while she suffers and groans.Perhaps while she suffers and dies: for possibly it is her dying groan that reaches your ear. Perhaps nature is spent in the hard travail: her son is born, and with Jacob's wife, she closes her languid eye and expires. Perhaps the instruments of death are upon her: the keen steel mangles her delicate frame: as Cæsar's mother, she generously suffers her body to be opened, that her unborn child may not be torn from her in pieces; and the fertile tree is unnaturally cut down, that the fruit may be safely gathered. Perhaps neither mother nor child can be saved and one grave is going to deprive a distracted mortal of a beloved Rachel, and a long expected Benjamin. If this is the case, O earth, earth, earth, conceal these slain cover their blood, and detain in thy dark bosom the fearful curse that brought them there. Vain wish! Too active to be confined in thy deepest vaults, it ranges through the world; with unrelenting fierceness, it pursues trembling mothers, and forces them to lift up their voice for speedy relief; though varied according to the accents of a hundred languages, it is the same voice-that of the bitterest anguish; and while it is reverberated from hamlet to hamlet, from city to city, it strikes the unprejudiced enquirer, and makes him confess that these clouds of unbribed witnesses, by their loud consentaneous evidence, impeach Sin, the tormentor of the woman, and murderer of her offspring.

;

But suppose the case is not so fatal, and she is at last delivered; her labour may be over, yet not her pain and danger; a lingering weakness may carry her slowly to the grave. If she recover, she may be a mother, manner of proposing his arguments, to the formal method of the schools. But they may easily try his enthymemes, by giving them the form of syllogisms, thus:

I. Argument. If the rod of God is fearfully shaken over this globe, the disordered habitation of mankind; it is a sign they are under his displeasure.

But God's rod is fearfully shaken over this globe, &c.; therefore mankind are under his displeasure.

II. Argument. A pure and innocent creature cannot be born under such and such deplorable circumstances.

But man is born under such and such deplorable circumstances. Therefore man is not a pure and innocent creature.

and yet unable to act a mother's part. Her pining child sucks her dis ordered breast in vain; either the springs of his balmy food are dried up, or they overflow with a putrid loathsome fluid, and excruciating ulcers cause the soft lips of the infant to appear terrible as the edge of the sword. If she happily escapes this common kind of distress, yet she may date the beginning of some chronical disease from her dangerous lying-in; and in consequence of her hard wrestling for the blessing of a child, may with the patriarch go halting all her days. How sensible are the marks of divine indignation in all these scenes of sorrow! And consequently, how visible our sinfulness and guilt!

Nor can the justness of the inference be denied, under pretence that the females of other animals, which neither do nor can sin, bring forth their young with pain as well as women. For, if we take a view of the whole earth, we shall not see any females, except the daughters of Eve, who groan under a periodical disorder, that entails languor and pain, weakness and mortal diseases, on their most blooming days. Nor do we in general find any that are delivered of their offspring with half the sorrow and danger of women. These two remarkable circumstances loudly call upon us to look for the cause of the sorrow which attends the delivery of female animals, where that sorrow is most sensibly felt, and to admire the perfect agreement that subsists between the observations of natural philosophers, and the assertion of the most ancient historian. Gen. iii. 16.

FOURTH ARGUMENT.

If we advert to mankind, even before they burst the womb of their tortured mothers, they afford us a new proof of their total degeneracy. For reason dictates, that if they were not conceived in sin, the Father of Mercies could not, consistently with his goodness and justice, command the cold hand of death to nip them in the unopened, or just opened bud. This nevertheless happens every hour. Who can number the early miscarriages of the womb? How many millions of miserable embryos feel the pangs of death before those of birth, and preposterously turn the fruitful womb into a living grave? And how many millions more of wretched infants escape the dangers of their birth-day, and salute the troublesome light only to take their untimely leave of it, after languishing for a few days on the rack of a convulsive or torturing disorder? I ask again, would a good and righteous God seal the death-warrant of such multitudes of his unborn, or newly born, creatures, if their natural depravity did not render them proper subjects of dissolution?

It is true the young of beasts suffer and die as well as infants; but it is only because they are involved in our misery. They partake of it as the attendants of a noble traitor share in his deserved ruin. Sin, that inconceivable, virulent, and powerful evil drew down God's righteous curse upon all that was created for man's use, as well as upon man himself. Hence only springs the degeneracy and death that turns beasts to one promiscuous dust with mankind. Compare Gen. iii. 17. Rom. v. 12. and viii. 22. We may then justly infer, from the sufferings and death of still-born or new-born children, that man is totally degenerate, and liable to destruction, even from his mother's womb.

FIFTH ARGUMENT.

But take your leave of the infant corpse already buried in the womb, or deposited in a coffin of a span long; fix your attention on the healthy, sucking child. See him stupidly staring in his nurse's lap, or awkwardly passing through childhood to manhood. How visible is his degeneracy

in every stage!

Part of the divine inage, in which he was made in Adam, consisted in purity, power, and knowledge; but now, he is naturally the least cleanly, as well as the most helpless and ignorant of all animals. Yes, if the reader could forgive the indelicacy of the assertion, for the sake of its truth, I would venture to shew, that there is no comparison between the cleanliness of the little active animals which suck the filthy swine, and of helpless infants who suck the purer breasts of their tender mothers. But casting a veil over the dribbling, loathsome, little creatures; without fear of being contradicted, I aver, that the young of those brutes, which are stupid to a proverb, know their dams, and follow them as soon as they are dropped, whilst infants are months without taking any particular notice of their parents, and without being able, I shall not say to follow them, but even to bear the weight of their swaddled body, or stand upon their tottering legs.

With reference to the knowledge necesssary for the support of animal life, it is undeniable that brutes have greatly the advantage of mankind. Fowls and fishes, immediately and with amazing sagacity, single out their proper nourishment among a thousand useless and noxious things; but infants put indifferently to their month all that comes to their hand, whether it be food or poison, a coral or a knife; and, what is more astonishing still, grown-up persons scarce ever attain to the knowledge of the quantity or quality of the meat and drink, which are most suitable to their constitutions.

All disordered dogs fix at once upon the salutary vegetable, that can (in some cases) relieve their distress: but many physicians, even after several years study and practice, hurt and sometimes kill their patients by improper medicines. Birds of passage, by mere instinct, find the north and the south more readily than mariners by the compass. Untaught spiders weave their webs, and uninstructed bees make their combs to the greatest perfection; but fallen man must serve a tedious apprenticeship to learn his own business; and with all the help of masters, tools, and patterns, seldom proves an ingenious artist.

Again, other animals are provided with a natural covering, that answers the double end of usefulness and ornament; but indigent man is obliged to borrow from plants, beasts, and worms, the materials with which he hides his nakedness, or defends his feebleness; and a great part of his short life is spent in providing, or putting on and off garments, the gaudy tokens of his shame, or ragged badges of his fall.

Are not these plain proofs that man, who, according to his superior rank and primitive excellency, should in all things have the pre-eminence, is now a degraded being, cursed for his apostacy with native uncleanliness helplessness, ignorance, and nakedness above all other animals?

SIXTH ARGUMENT.

MAN's natural ignorance, great as it is, might nevertheless be overlooked, if he had but the right knowledge of his Creator. But alas! the holy and righteous God judicially withdraws himself from his unholy apostate creatures. Man is not properly acquainted with Him, " in whom he lives, and moves, and hath his being." This humbling truth may be demonstrated by the following observations:

God is infinitely perfect; all the perfection which is found in the most exalted creatures, is but the reflexion of the transcendent effulgence belonging to that glorious Sun of spiritual beauty; it is but the surface of the unfathomable depths of goodness and loveliness which regenerate souls discover in that boundless ocean of all excellence. If, therefore, men saw God, they could far less help being struck with holy awe, overwhelmed with pleasing wonder, and ravished with delightful admiration; than a man born blind, and restored to sight in the blaze of a summer's day,

could help being transported at the glory of the new and unexpected scene. "Could we but see virtue in all her beauty," said a heathen "she would ravish our hearts* :" how much greater would our ravishment be, if we were indulged with a clear immediate discovery of the divine beauty, the eternal original of all virtue, the exuberant fountain of all perfection and delight? But alas! how few thus behold, know, and admire God, may easily be seen by the impious, or vain conduct of mankind.

If a multitude of men ingeniously confess they know not the king; if they take his statue or one of his attendants for him; or if they doubt whether there be a king, or sport with his name and laws in his presence, we reasonably conclude that they neither see nor know the royal person. And is not this the case of the superstitious, who, like the Athenians, worship an unknown God? or idolaters, who bow to favourite mortals, or lifeless images, as to the true God? of infidels, who doubt the very being of a God? and of open sinners, the bulk of mankind, who live everywhere as if there was none?

Our natural ignorance of God manifests itself still more evidently by the confessions both of real and nominal Christians. The former, before they knew God, and were admitted to "behold his glory shining in the face of Jesus Christ," bitterly complaineth as Isaiah, "Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself;" or mournfully asked with David, "How long wilt thou hide thy face from me?" It is plain, then, that by nature they were as others, without God (practical atheists) in the world, and have as much reason as St. Paul to declare, that "the world by wisdom knew not God."

As for nominal Christians, though they daily pray that "the fellowship of the Holy Ghost may be with us all," it is evident they are utter strangers to communion with God by his Holy Spirit. For if we affirm, that he blesses his children with a spiritual discovery of his presence, and "manifests himself to them as he doth not to the world," they say we are mad or cali us enthusiasts. This behaviour shews, beyond all confessions, that they are totally unacquainted with the light of God's countenance; for what greater proof can a blind man give that he has no knowledge of the sun, than to suspect his neighbour of lunacy for affirming that sunshine is a delightful reality?

From this moral demonstration of our natural ignorance of God, I draw the following conclusion:-If the Lord, who is a mild and condescending king to all his loyal subjects, a father full of endearing and tender love to all his dutiful children; hides his face from mankind in a natural state; and if what little they know of him is only by conjecture, hearsay, or inferencet; it is a proof that they are under his displeasure, and, consequently, that they are rebellious fallen creatures.

For what but rebellion could thus separate between beings so nearly related, as an infinitely gracious Creator, and favourite creature, whose soul is, according to a heathen, divinæ particula auræ; and according to Moses," the very breath of God?" We may then rationally conclude with the evangelical prophet, that "our iniquities have separated between us and our God, and that our sins have hid his face from us," eclipsed the Sun of Righteousness, and brought such darkness on our souls, that by nature, we know neither what we are, nor what we should be; neither whence we came, nor whither we are going; neither the grand business we have to do, nor the danger that attends our leaving it undone.

* Si virtus conspiciretur oculis, mirabiles amores excitaret sui.-CICERO. This is the knowledge of God mentioned Rom. i. 21.—It is sufficient to leave without excuse those who do not improve it till they attain to the saving knowledge mentioned John xvii. 3. 2 John v. 20.