462 STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF HUMAN E.EAtO, piness, yet they are never likely to become effectual for these pur- poses to one in a thousand. When there is a long established habit, and universal custom of neglecting or abusing their facul- ties spread through whole nations from age to age, these faculties may be called practically insufficient, without any charge upon the Creator of man, or his original constitution of things. I answer in the second place; that God did not create all mankind for happiness, in such a sense, as to design they should be all actually happy. This is sufficiently evident by the event ; for the greatest part of mankind are, and will be sinful and mi- serable : Our daily experience and observation concur with our reason to manifest this to us ; and our Saviour says, that few find the way to life. Now may not the great and blessed God, the supreme Lord of all, and Governor of the universe, have some very wise and unsearchableends in not securing certain happiness to all his rational creation ; that is, in leaving some of themwilfully to neglect their own happiness, and to clause their own misery? May he not, consistently with his own perfections, suffer them, by their own folly and negligence, by their guilt and madness, to forfeit the light and strength of those faculties which were at first practically sufficient to guide and conduct them to happiness ? Or to render them dark and feeble by an utter dis- use, or an actual abuse, of them? It is granted, that man in his original state had aproximate and practical sufficiency to obtain happiness by virtue and religion; yet since he is grown some way or other, a verycorrupt and degenerate creature, his reason- ingpowers are now hardly to be called a sufficient guide, or rule, or law, for his conduct to the original happiness for which he was made. Loc. But what is there wanting to make a rule or law suf- ficient to the end of its being a rule or law, but that it be plain and clear, and easy to be understood, and enforced with sufficient sanction of rewards and punishments ? Now reason always was and is such a law to mankind, even since any supposed degene- racy, as well as before. PITH. Dear Sir, have you already forgot the two accounts which Sophronius has given us of African and American savages, and their reasoning powers ? Have you forgot the whole subject of our first day's conference ? Can you bring these things back to your thoughts,'a.nd yet imagine, that these rules of religion and virtue, these sacred laws and sanctions, which you speak of, areplain and clear, and easy to be found out and understood by such stupid andperverse animals, with all their wretched reason- ings ? Have they, within their view, any such ideas of these eternal obligations to duty, either to God or man, or of these awful sanctions of future punishments and rewards ? Can these holy rules and sanctions be called plain, and clear, and easy to
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