ESSAY I. 425 creatures as they came out of the hand of their Creator, harm- less and innocent ? If the children had been esteemed, in the eyeof God, as such undefiled, holy, and guiltless beings as some men are ready to imagine, could this have been their portion ? In short, can we suppose, that the. wise and righteous, and mer- ciful Creator of the world, would have established and continued . such a constitution for the propagation of mankind, which should naturally have led so many millions of them so early into such dismal circumstances and temptations of almost unaviodable iniquity ? Or Would the blessed God have ever thus treated whole nations of infants, who are the work of his hands, if ,there had not been some dreadful and universal degeneracy . spread over them and their fathers, by some original crime. and which even met and seized them at their entrance into moral life, according to somejust and ancient constitution ? And what con- stitution can this be, but the original covenant with Adam in innocence, and the spreading consequences of his sin ? But as I have insisted upon several ofthese things at large, under some of the first questions in this treatise, I chuse not to repeat them here; but I will only stay to answer three or four general objections. Objection I. It is a most Unreasonable and unrighteous thing, to impute the sin of one person to another, and to make the children and posterity of a sinner suffer any of the punishments which were due to the father's sin ; therefore the righteous and holy God has never appointed any such constitution, nor can he do it. Answer. It is evident that death was the punishment threat- ened to man for sin, while he stood in innocence, to deter him from it : It is evident again from other Scriptures, that death is the actual wages or punishmentof sin : It is plain also from universal experience, that deathpasses upon ä1t men, even upon children, and a thousand other miseries of life attend them ; and it is granted by many of those writers who oppose our doctrine, that these miseries and death come upon children by the means of the sin of their first father. Now I could never yet learn any fair and justifiable account, how such sickness and pain, misery and death should come upon all mankind by means of the sinof Adamn, if it be not in some sense imputed to them, even in the sense in which I have explained it in the second essay. Let those writers give a fair and rational account, how this can come to pass but by such a constitution as I have represented. It is not enough to say, that the just and righteous God appointed or even per- mitted it, in order to bring abúut greater'glory to himself, and greater blessedness to mankind by the gospel of Christ, unless everyone of those who suffer on the account of Adam's sin are madepartakers 'of this greater blessedness, the contrary wherettf it sufficiently evident.
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