QUESTION IX. 32$ reason couldand might tell them, that if they bad offended God, the original and sovereign giver of life, they had forfeited this life, and that God might deprive them of it, that is, put them to death ; and as be had given them health as well as life, so he might lead them down to the grave by many and long sicknesses and sorrows, depriving them of health and ease*. Here then is a very natural and evident account whence all the maladies, suf- ferings, miseries and death that attend mankind may arise. Reason teachesus that they are all the natural or penal effects of sin, and of the anger of our Maker for sin : For man being a rational and intelligent creature, mustcome out of the hands of a God perfectly holyand perfectly good, in a state of innocence, virtue, health and peace ; this the goodness of God seems to require: And whatever pains or miseries attend him, cannot be thenecessary consequences of his nature as a creature, because as such he must be made innocent and undeserving of pain; but it mustbe therefore the fruit of some voluntary choiceof evil, or some early and Universal offence against his Maker. How can we'suppose that a just and merciful God would inflict on every man so much natural evil, or pain and death, where there was no moral evil to deserve it, no sin to procure it ? VII. Reason or the light of nature would further inform us, that since all mankind are sinners, and since God, the righteous Governor of the, world, sees fit topunish them for their sins, and not to deal with them as though they were innocent,. the same righteous God, as I hinted before, would think it proper to punish greater iniquities with greater miseries, and to deal more, gently with those whose sins were of a lesser kind ; or that such who have some degrees of virtue found among them, or less degrees of guilt, should feel a lesser and easier punishment. VIII. Now the common observation that every man makes of the affairs of this world may sufficiently inform him, that . there is almost an infinite difference in the moral characters and practices of men, and in their deserts of punishment. It is plain as the sun-beams, that all men in the world may be divided into these three sorts of persons : -1. There are some persons of an abandoned and profligate character, whose whole life is a Conti- * Hera note, that as human life often includes not only existence, but all the blessings that attend it, and all possible enjoyments whatsoever, more especi- ally such as arevisible and sensible; so the word " death," in the general notion of it, and in the most obvious and common sense of mankind, may reasonably include a loss of every thing which man possessed, that is, existence itself, together with all the blessingsof it: And coußequ,ntly when 't death" was threatened for sin, it more obviously appeared to signify, that by sin span for- feited every thing that he had received from his Maker, This, I say, might be . the first and most obvious signification of the word " death" when it was consi- dered as reaching only to things visible, though afterwards its sense might be enlarged or limited on particular occasions as the invisible wurld came further into the notice of men. x 2
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