QUESTION I. 243 ever they meet them ? Would there have been any such creatures in our world as bears and tygers, wolves and lions, animated with such fierceness and rage, and armed with such destructive and bloody teeth and talons, if man the supreme creature in it had not sinned and fallen out of his Maker's kindest care? Or would these murderous animals ever have been let into, a paradise made for the habitation of innocent be- ings ; and that without power given to those innocents to govern and restrain them, or without sufficient art or speed to escape them ? Would the children of men, innocent and holy, have ever been formed to be the living prey of these devourers? Were the life and limbs of such holy creatures made to be- come heaps of agonizing carnage? Or would their flesh and bones have been given up to be crushed and churned be- tween the jaws of panthers and leopards, sharks and croco- diles, by land and sea ? Are sensible, rational and innocent beings fit morsels for savages of the brutal kind, and were they first made for this purpose by a God of wisdom and goodness ? Let brutes be contented to prey upon their fellow-brutes, but let man be their lord and ruler, and free from their assaults: Andso he was, says the Jewish law-giver, in his first and inno- cent state. Give me leave to proceed in these enquiries. If man were not a fallen sinful creature fit for punishment, would there have been so many tribes of the serpent and viper kind armed with deadly venom to bite and kill man ? Would such subtle and ac- tive mischiefs have been made and sent to dwell ina world which wasall holy and happy ? And would the race of all these mur- derous and destructive brutes of every kind have been propa- gated for six thousand years in any province of God's dominion, unless he had foreseen at first, that his intellectual creatures there would have rebelled against him, and deserved to be given up to their power and rage ? What are the immense flights of locusts which darken the sky, and lay the fields desolate ? What are the winged armies of hornets and muscatoes, that make a pleasant land almost intolerable by the incessant and restless attacks they make on mankind with their painful stings ? If they are found in the scorching climates of Africa, and in t .e sultry parts of the East and West Indies, yet one would think such noisome and venomous flies should not swarm upon the hills of Russia, and infest the polar regions, if the Creator had not designed them for the vexation of the nations on all sides of the globe. What are the innumerable hosts of caterpillars which in a night or two turn agarden into a desart, but so many messengers of the anger of God, against a sinful race of beings that dwell upon this earth 1 And since we are neither able to resist or sub- a2
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