garding all their intellectual and moral movements, as the product of causes as much above and beyond themselves, as those on which the changes of season, or other processes of the visible world depend. And if these results do not undermine the foundations of virtue and religion, it is perhaps less owing to their own inherent tendencies, than to those moral sentiments which are too intimately grafted upon our natures, to admit of their yielding to the attacks of a hostile philosophy.

Owing to these facts, therefore, though we are unable to break a link in Edwards' chain of ratiocination, or gainsay his conclusions, is it not safest and best to confine ourselves in our religious reasonings, to those more obvious materials which we find in the plain sense of Scripture, and in the consciousness and common sense of mankind? In having given this abstruse mode of inquiry such an extent of control in theology, as we have done for centuries past, and especially since Edwards reduced its materials to form and order, how have we sowed the seeds of discord among brethren? How have we neglected those processes of legitimate reasoning, for which we find a basis in the materials furnished us by the Spirit of inspiration! Up to this day, how fearful is the war which different portions of the christian family are waging against each other, because the combinations of thought which they have educed from this murky region do not accord? One party would fain torture all others into a belief that sin is nothing but action in view of motive; another would force upon us the opposite belief; and so we meet, and so we clash, and so we defeat the benevolent designs of our common faith, and so we help the cause of our adversaries; when, if either party were to succeed, it would neither increase our knowledge of the Scriptures, nor our acquaintance with the arts of holy living.

SECTION V.

Metaphysical Theology. Tendencies of Edwards' theory in the hands of
his successors.

The followers of Edwards soon discovered that there was no stopping midway in the system, by ascribing to God merely the arrangement of the causes of moral action. They therefore proceeded to resolve into His direct agency and sovereign will, all human volitions whether good or bad. Hopkins in speaking of liberty observes, that it consits in voluntary exercises, not in something antecedent in our minds, by which those exercises are determined. To place liberty in what precedes and produces our acts of choice, is to place it in that in which we have no concern as agents, as we are no more active in that which precedes our exercises of will or choice than a rock or a stone.* And he goes on to say that God did all to produce sin that he did to create the world.

The sinner is indeed the cause of sin in that sense that it is his own voluntary action. But still, there is a cause why he should so act rather than not. Something must have taken place previous to his sin, and in which the sinner had no hand, with which his sin was so connected, as to render it certain that it should take place. "It is said that God merely permitted evil: then his permitting it is the cause, and is really decreeing that it shall take place."t Indeed, "to say that God merely permitted sin is to say that it had no cause, for a negative cause is no cause. Would God's permitting the world to exist be admitted as a cause of its existence? His permitting evil to exist supposes that there was some positive energy by which it was produced. What is this energy? Does it exist in God or in the creature? If in the creature, whence + Ibid. p. 160.

* System of Divinity Vol. 1. p. 129.

is the origin of this positive cause? Is its origin in itself; or in the creature? Or must we go back to the first cause? If either of these suppositions be admitted except the last, we are involved in the absurdity of sin being the cause of itself. If God permitted the existence of sin he willed it, he did all to produce it that he did in creating the world; for in the latter he only said, Let it be, there being a certain connection between his willing an event and its existence. He is the cause of evil therefore the same as he is the cause of any thing." Such are the results to which the theory of Edwards conducted his pupil!

And those which have followed in the same line of reasoning, since the time of Dr. Hopkins, as Dr. Emmons and others, have carried the matter to equal extremes. That God has foretold nothing which his glory does not require him to fulfil, that his predictions tell us what his heart is fixed upon, that he will pursue all such things to the utmost of his power, that his bringing to pass some events demonstrates the truth of his bringing to pass all events, that every sinful as well as every holy volition is produced by the direct energy of God as much as the creation of the world, and that the glory of God and the good of the universe, depends upon its being known that his heart and his hand are concerned in every event that takes place, are favorite positions with the men of this school.*

Hence, Edwards' theory of necessity has been carried to a much greater extreme than Hobbes ever dreamed of carrying his. For, while the latter supposed that God is only concerned in arranging the various concourse of causes one by one from which the volition proceeds, till it reaches the result which it is intended to subserve, the advocates of the former

* See Emmons' Sermons.

have ascribed all volitions, whether good or bad, not to intermediate agencies, but to the direct and immediate exertion of divine Power. And it is curious to observe the ingenious methods, by which these good men contrive to interweave their ideas of faith and duty, with positions more ultra than Hobbes deemed necessary to establish his skeptical doctrine of absolute fate. While they all concur that the cause of our volitions is wholly beyond our control, and produces its result upon us by a necessity as absolute as that which governs the motions of the spheres, yet, that we are to blame for having those volitions, because, they tell us, the morality of our actions is no way concerned, in the causes which produce them. "Moral liberty consists," according to a statement already quoted from Hopkins, and Edwards expresses the same," in voluntary exercises, and not in the causes which determine them." But we do not reason thus in human jurisprudence. The crime of seduction is imputed, not to both the parties concerned, but to the one who contrives, by various ingenious methods, to obtain the consent of the other. And owing to her being exposed to such arts in controling the decisions of her will, we consider the seduced unfortunate, rather than criminal. But God's power to control the decisions of our will, must be vastly above those which one creature is capable of employing upon another; and why, therefore, if all our volitions are the result of his own positive agency, may we not also claim to be considered unfortunate rather than criminal?

But the manner in which they contrive, upon their system, to clear God from the imputation of evil, is if possible, still more ingenious. "Though God," says Hopkins, "is the cause of evil he cannot be evil himself, because the cause must exist before its effect. Evil is the effect,and it is therefore certain that there could have been no evil in its cause, because it would be

supposing that the effect existed before the cause. Moral evil cannot be the cause of evil any more than an effect can be the cause of itself." Why not say also that holiness, goodness and benevolence are effects, whose cause must have been prior to themselves, and therefore that their existence in the universe is no evidence that God is holy, good, and benevolent? Moral evil is a quality of character as much as these attributes, and its existence in a being is brought to our knowledge, by the product of his active energies, or by the fruit he bears. If therefore, God, by a direct and positive energy, has poured out upon the universe the floods of mischief, pollution and wo, which have deluged some of its fairest portions, why have we not the same evidence that evil or malevolence, is a quality of his character, as that benevolence is so, from the good which he has done to other portions still? Indeed, the above reasoning is so utterly preposterous, and so remote from the sum of the truths that bear upon the subject, that it seems like insanity. It resembles that species of mental derangement called by the physicians monomany,which consists in being so absorbed by a single idea, that the general facts which should influence the decisions of the mind, are lost sight of, or tinged with unatural hues. Thus, when our intellectual habits become thoroughly formed to this abstruse mode of reasoning, the materials. which constitute the only real basis of our knowledge, are cast aside or thrown into distorted shapes, while the mind revels insanely amid the scenes of a remote abstraction, yielding itself to every deduction, however irreconcilable with facts, which may there obtrude upon its perceptions. Such are the legitimate offspring of metaphyscial theology, a compound more pregnant in absurdities and divisions to the church, than any other which the human mind has ever invented.

It is occasion of gratitude to God, however, that