Wesley Corpus

Can we ever imagine the great and good God would have appointed men to be propagated in such a way as would necessarily give such exquisite pain and anguish to the mothers that produce them, if they had been all accounted in his eyes a race of holy and sinless beings?” (Page 31.) I answer, It is not true, “that too great stress,” or any stress at all, is “here laid on mere supposition and imagina tion.” Your catching at those two words, suppose and imagine, will by no means prove it; for the meaning of them is plain. “Can we suppose the blessed God would do this?” is manifestly the same with, “How can we reconcile it with his essential attributes?” In like manner, “Can we ever imagine?” is plainly equivalent with, “Can we possibly conceive?” So that the occasional use of these words does not infer his laying any stress on supposition and imagination. When, therefore, you add, “Our suppositions and imagi nations are not a just standard by which to measure the divine dispensations,” (page 32,) what you say is absolutely true, but absolutely foreign to the point. Some of the questions which you yourself ask, to expose his it is not so easy to answer: “Would innocent creatures have been thrust into the world in so contemptible circumstances, and have been doomed to grow up so slowly to maturity and the use of reason? Would they, when grown up, have been constrained to spend so much time in low and servile labour? Would millions have been obliged to spend all their days, from early morn until evening, in hewing stone, sawing wood, heaving, rubbing, or beating the limb of an oak, or a bar of iron?” (Page 33.) I really think they would not. I believe all this toil, as well as the pain and anguish of women in child-birth, is an evidence of the fall of man, of the sin of our first parents, and part of the punishment denounced and executed, first on them, and then on all their posterity. You add: “He doth not consider this world as a state of trial, but as if it ought to have been a seat of happiness.” (Pages 34, 35.) There is no contrariety between these: It might be a state of trial and of happiness too.