CONCLUSION. 393 passionate doctrine of the sincere and extensive offers of merey to every sinner, according to the degree of the discoveries of the grace of God in the age and nation wherein he lives we shall acquire a more large, more generous and diffusive benevolence to all our fellow-creatures of the race of Adam : We shall give a large foundation for hope to every guilty creature among man- kind, assuring them that the great God bathdebarred none from his mercy but those Whodebar themselves by impenitence and unbelief. We shall vindicate the goodness and justice of God in his dispensations towards men, and leave thefinal condemna- tion of wilful impenitents, and of all the wicked of the earth, entirely upon their own heads. If it be enquired, what farther advantages can be derived from so peculiar a doctrine as this last section contains, viz. that the children of unregenerate or unholy parents, who never lived to do good or evil, and died only under the guilt of 11dam's sin, have sustained their whole penalty at death, and will never be raised to life again ? I answer, in these three particulars : I. Hereby the conduct of divine providence, with regard to the millions of infantcreatures in all the numerous nations of the earth, will be justified from the severe censures whichhave been cast upon it by men in accusing the doctrine of original sin : For if they suffer nothing but temporal death, as being fallen in Adam their bead, all these terrors of pretended cruelty and severity will vanish, whileit appears that eternal damnation be- longs only to those who have been guilty of actual transgression in their own persons ; for there is not one word in all the scrip- ture concerning eternal misery inflicted upon any person merely forthe sinof Adam. 1I. This hypothesis not only absolves the providence of God from supposed cruelty, but perhaps it represents it as good and gracious towards far the greatest part of those that are born ofAdam ; while they are not suffered to live and grow up amidst the temptations of this world, and under their present corrupt principles ofnature, but are precludedfrom rendering-themselves more miserable, by being cut off in infancy, and never having it in their power to dogood or evil themselves. III. This scheme relieves the difficulties which sometimes have been east upon the laws or orders of God given theJewish nation, to out- off so many thousand children of the Canaanites when they entered into the promised land : For hereby these children are subjected only to temporal death as the consequent and penalty of Adam'.s sin, and are, if I may so express it, secured from eternal misery, by being prevented from growing up to imitate the iniquities of their fathers, and to expose them- selves to God's eternal ,judgment and damnation. If some per- son should again object, why then may not oleo slay their own
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