QUESTION L 245 .pious sufferers among them, andwho behavewell in dying, may be rewarded by a happy resurrection. This may be appointed withmuch,more propriety, than than a. painful, death should be madea part of the trial of innocent creatures, who had never forfeited life, nor were ever legally subjected to death. In the case of dying infants, this appears with greater evidence, as I shall skew afterward. Upon the whole therefore, such sort ofnoxions and destruc- tive plants and animals do not seem to be made,for a world of innocent, sensible and intellectual beings, to vex, and disturb, to poison and destroy them*.. Objection. $ut did not God renew to Noah the dominion over the brute creatures ? An- swer. Not in such an ample manner as he first possessed it ; but only the fear of man was to fall upon the brutes : Now this does not sufficiently preserve men from their outrage and mischief; whereas in the innocent state, no man would have been poisoned or tora,by serpents or lions as now. See ques- tion VIII. section 6. III. The manner of the introduction of the race of man into life and being in this world, is another proof that we are not the innocent favourites of heaven. Can we ever imagine the great and good God would have appointed intellectual animals to be propagated in such a way as should necessarily give such exquisite pain and anguish to the mothers who produce them, if we had been all accounted in his eyes a race of holy and sinless beings ? And if the contagion or crime had not been universal, why should such acute pangs attend almost every female parent in bringing their offspring into the light of life Are not the multiplied sorrows with which the daughters ofEve. continually bring forth their young, a pretty evident token that -they are not in their original state of favour with that God who .created them, and pronounced a blessing upon them in their propagationt. The Jewish law-giver in the beginning of his history tells us, that God blessed the first man and woman that he made, and bid them be fruitful, andmultiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; Gen. i. 28. and the same ancient writer within a page or two tells us, that these cr multiplied sorrows" in the bearing and birth of children are pronounced as a curse from anoffended, God, chapter iii. 16. Surely the curse is not * As therehappened an entire revolution in the complexion and qualities of the minds of the first pair of mankind, no to me, there appears to be evident indications of a designed change and alteration of the material world, and the natureof the animals and vegetables which subsist on this globe, from what they were when God pronounced every Ming good Ghat he had made. Doctor Cheyne in his essay of ar Health and Long Life." } The author has been censured here for not dropping a tear over the fair sex under their sorrows and acute pains r But he imagines he has been dropping tears inevery pager and that over every part of mankind, and on them in parti- cular in several paragraphs of this book. Q3
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