Wesley Corpus

See, first, what a figure he makes, at his entrance into life! “This animal,” says Pliny, ‘who is to govern the rest of the creatures, how he lies bound hand and foot, all in teals, and begins his life in misery and pun ishment!’ If we trace the education of the human race, from the cradle to mature age, especially among the poor, who are the bulk of all nations, the wretchedness of mankind will farther appear. How are they everywhere dragged up in their tender age,through a train of nonsense, madness, and miseries! What millions of uneasy sensations do they endure in infancy and childhood, by reason of those pressing necessities, which, for some years, they can tell only in cries and groans, and which their parents are either so poor they cannot relieve, or so savage or blutish that they will not! How wretchedly are these young generations hurried on through the folly and weakness of child hood, till new calamities arise from their own ungoverned appe tites and impetuous passions! As youth advances, the ferments of the blood rise higher, and the appetites and passions grow much stronger, and give more abundant vexation to the race of mankind than they do to any of the brutal creation. And whereas the all-wise God, for kind reasons, has limited the gratification of these appetites by rules of virtue; perhaps those very rules, through the corruption of our nature, irritate mankind to greater excesses.” (Pages 368, 369.) “Would the affairs of human life, in infancy, childhood, and youth, have ever been in such a sore and painful situation, if man had been such a being as God at first made him, and had continued in the favour of his Maker?