Wesley Corpus

A creature of a more exalted kind Was wanting yet; and then was man design'd: Conscious of thought, of more capacious breast, For empire form’d, and fit to rule the rest. Whether with particles of heavenly fire The God of nature did his soul inspire, And moulding up a mass in shape like ours, Form'd a bright image of the all-ruling powers, And while the mute creation downward bend Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend, Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes Beholds his own hereditary skies.’ “Now, if man was formed in the image of God, certainly he was a holy and a happy being. But what is there like holi ness or happiness now found, running through this rank of creatures? Are there any of the brutal kind that do not more regularly answer the design of their creation? Are there any brutes that we ever find acting so much below their original character, on the land, in the water, or the air, as mankind does all over the earth? Or are there any tribes among them, through which pain, vexation, and misery are so plentifully distributed as they are among the children of men?” (Pages 359, 360, 361.) “Were this globe of earth to be surveyed from one end to the other by some spirit of a superior order, it would be found such a theatre of folly and madness, such a maze of mingled vice and misery, as would move the compassion of his refined nature to a painful degree, were it not tempered by a clear sight of that wise and just Providence which strongly and sweetly works in the midst of all; and will, in the end, bring good out of all evil, and justify the ways of God with man.” (Page 362.) A PARTICULAR VieW of ThE MISERIES OF MAN. “BUT, to wave for the present the sins and follies of man kind, may we not infer from his miseries alone, that we are degenerate beings, bearing the most evident marks of the displeasure of our Maker?” (Page 863.) “View the histories of mankind; and what is almost all his tory but a description of the wretchedness of men, under the mischiefs they bring upon themselves, and the judgments of the great God?