But we find the difficulty noticed in a prize essay of three hundred pages, on the subject of native depravity, by Dr. Woods. The author assumes the same ground with Edwards, that all suffering must be justified on the ground of justice; and hence he finds a real and proper sin in infants, in order to reconcile their sufferings with the character of God. This is the only ground, according to Dr. Woods, on which suffering can be vindicated under the administration of a perfect God. Where, then, is the real and proper sin in the inferior animals to justify their sufferings? This difficulty occurs to the distinguished author, and he endeavours to meet it. Let us see his reply. It is a reply which we have long been solicitous to see, and we now have it from one of the most celebrated theologians of the present day. “Some suppose,” says he, “that infants suffer as irrational animals do, without reference to a moral law or the principles of a moral government. A strange supposition indeed, that _human beings_ should for a time be ranked with beings which are not human, that is, mere animals.” He is evidently shocked at such an insult offered to poor little infants. He will not allow us, for one moment, to take the whole race of man, “during the interesting period of infancy, cut them off from their relation to Adam, degrade them from the dignity of human beings, and put them in the rank of brute animals,—and then say, they _suffer as the brutes do_.... This would be the worst of all theories,—the farthest off from Scripture and reason, and the most revolting to all the noble sensibilities of man.” Now, it is really refreshing to find these allusions to “the dignity of human beings” in a writer of this school; and especially in Dr. Woods, who has so often rebuked others for their pride, when they have imagined that they were only engaged in the laudable enterprise of asserting this very dignity, by raising men from the rank of mere machines. It is so refreshing, indeed, to find such allusions in Dr. Woods, that we could almost forgive a little special pleading and bad logic in his attempt to vindicate the “dignity of human beings,” which should have been an attempt to vindicate the goodness of God.