264 RUIN AND RECOVERY, &C. extreme anguish -? Are not all our tenderest powers shocked and pained when we hear of infants left on their couches, or in their cradles, by poor parents for a hour or two, while dogs or hogs have gnawed oû' their flesh from their bones, and they have been found in dying agonies and blood ? And what shall we say of whole nations in older times, or the Hottentots in our age, who expose their children in the woods when they cannot or will not maintain them, to be torn and devoured by any savage beast that passes by? Are these little young crea- turescounted perfectly innocent and guiltless in the eyes of that God, who by his providence leaves them to be exposed to so dis- mal a fate ? Add to all this the common calamities in which these infants are involved, when fires, or earthquakes, or pestilence ragé through a whole town or city, and multitudes of them being help- less perish with extreme pain. And there are a thousand other accidents that-attend these littlecreatures, whereby their mem- bers or their natural powers receive dismal injuries, and perhaps they drag on life with blindness, deafness, lameness or distortion of body or limbs'; sometimes they languish on to manhood, and sometimes to old age, under miseries and sore calamities, which began almost as soon as their being, and which are only ended by death. Now as these sorrows and death cannot be sent upon them, ina way ofcorrection for their personal and actual sins, for they have none, so neither are they sent for the trial of their virtue, or as any part of amoral state of probation ; for they have no rea- son in exercise, no knowledge of good and evil, andare incapa.. hle of virtue, as well as vice, or any moral probation in their early infancy and state of ignorance; yet we see multitudes of these little miserable beings ; and are they treated as the inno- cent harmless creatures of a God of love and compassion ? Amidst all these surrounding scenes of danger and distress, do they look like young, favourites of heaven ? Or rather, do they not seem to be a little sort of criminals under some general curse and punishment If mankind had stood in their original innocence, surely their infant offspring would have entered into the world under, some general word of blessing. The God who made the first parents of mankind mustcertainly have blessed them, in several other respects, as well as in saying, .I3efruit=ful, and multiply, and replenish the earth; Gen. i. 28. And their infants would have been born like little young angels, ever easy and smiling in a perfection of innocence, and in circumstances of pleasure : And they would have grown up by many little efforts of goodness to the fuller knowledge and love of their Maker, and the practice of every virtue, surrounded with the comforts and satisfactions
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