QUESTION XVI, 881 creatures, as intelligent and free agents, according to their own personal actions and behaviour. Some perhaps shall sooner be adjudged capable and sufficient to act for themselves, and shall be dealt with according to their own moral conduct, and some much later ; and both according to their degrees of capacity to know, to chuse, and to refuse good or evil. But this season is known only to God himself, and the Judge of all the earth will do right; Gen. xviii. 25. In the mean time, while they are deemed infants, and have no personal sin or obedience of their own, but only he under the sentence of death for the sin of Adam, so far as it is imputed to them, let us not send any of their Iittle souls into a separate state of torment, as soon as death has seized their bodies, with- out an express divinewarrant: Nor let us raise up their bodies again from the dead, and then doom them, soul and body, to intense anguish and everlasting fire and sorrow, merely for Adam's sin, unless we can find some very evident sentence of this kind passed upon them in the word of God: The equity and the compassion of a God, so far as we can judge of it by the light of reason, would not inflict.so severe and eternal a punishment on these little creatures, who are personally innocent or free from actual sin : And unless we can find some divine revelation that pronounces it with great strength and evidence, let us -not so far contradict the gentler dictates of nature and reason, as to assert this opinion for truth, nor impose it on our own belief, nor on the belief of others. Let us try then, whe- ther we cannot find out some milder punishment for their share of the guilt of Adam, in the bible. May we not humbly suip- pose, that a most wise, most righteous, and most merciful God, will deal with them according to the following principles, de- rived partly from the scriptures, and partly from the reason of things ? PrincipleI. As the children of men had all been born inno- cent and happy, and had worn out their infant state in innocence and happiness, if Adam their father and surety had stood firm in his obedience ; so by his fall and disobedience to God, we have already'proved that they are all involved with him in so much of his guilt and misery, as that theycome into the world withnatures corrupted and vitiated, both with the principles of sin and seeds of death : This we have shown before : And they are exposed hereby to death, that is, to the common and everlasting forfei- ture of all those blessings, and all that life and existence, both of soul and body, which God had freely given them : See ques- tion XI. section III. of eternal death. And as for the execu- tion of this general sentence, we find it so far executed on children, that they suffer the pains and agonies of mortality, and at last bodily death ; though they have not sinned, that is, per-
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