This principle removes a whole class of errors and objections. If a person wilfully persists in selfishness in violation of the law of love and so misses all true good, it is objected that God created him only to damn him. Whereas God created a moral system under the law of love, gave this person being in it, and endowed him with the high powers of reason and free will, therein making him in God's image and capable of knowing God and of being blessed in being like him and serving him and his fellow men in love; and God exhausted the resources of wisdom and love in influencing him so to live; but the person persisted in the life of selfishness and thus deprived himself of all true good. God purposed the destiny of this person only as he purposed the perfect moral system and gave to him its high powers and opportunities. A moral system is possible only as it is composed of beings free to do right or to do wrong.

5. So far as God brings events to pass by his own immediate efficiency, he purposes to do so. So far as events are brought to pass by the immediate agency of second causes, this also is accordant with God's purpose. We have seen that God has created the universe having real though dependent being, that he has constituted it in accordance with the eternal principles and laws of reason, and that it and everything in it must act according to the constitution of its being. God will not change the fundamental principles of the constitution, because the change would be contrary to eternal reason. Immanent in the universe, God acts on, in, and through the beings and agencies in it, causing effects commensurate with the constitution of the being or agency on, in, or through which he acts. Here are three factors in God's providential government; his immediate creative efficiency; the intermediate efficiency of created beings and agencies; and God's action on, in, and through these. These are also all included in God's purpose, because he acts as he does in the full knowledge of all the actual results, immediate or remote, of his action. In these ways, God carries on his providential government of the universe; the physical system is evolved through successive stages; when the physical system is sufficiently evolved to make their existence possible, personal beings appear, and their education, discipline, and development go on under moral law and government, and under redemption. Thus God is progressively accomplishing his eternal purpose to realize in the universe his

archetypal idea of perfection and well-being by the expression of his own perfections and the manifestation of his wisdom and love, so far as possible in a finite universe consistently with the eternal principles and laws of reason.

The doctrine of God's eternal purpose implies no divine power energizing in the universe other than that which is recognized in his providential government. This removes various common errors and objections founded on the idea that if God purposes an event he must interpose his own direct efficiency to cause it.

It follows that the acts of free agents are purposed by God only as their own free acts which he foresees they will do if he gives reality to the moral system which reason demands and which his perfect wisdom and love require. Therefore, it is not properly said that it is God's purpose that men shall do as they do, but only that they will do as they do; that is, he knows, in the archetype of the universe which he purposes to realize, that they freely will do so.1

6. Whatever is in fact the constitution of things under God's government is that which he has eternally purposed.

The relations between God's action and man actually existing in the constitution of the universe are those which God eternally purposes. If men are free agents, in fact God eternally purposes that they shall be so. If God's action does not determine man's action in fact, he eternally purposes to leave man to free selfdetermination. If God's action is in fact merely the occasion of man's action, he eternally purposes it to be so. If in any case God's action affects man only in the sense that he created him with a certain constitution and placed him in a certain environment subject to certain external influences under which the man acts freely, this is the relation between his action and man's which God eternally purposes. If God comes to man in redemption, and in the Holy Spirit exerts on him influences under which the man freely returns in loving and penitential trust to God, this also God eternally purposed.

The relations of means and end actually existing in God's gov

1 Anselm says: "God foresees that I shall sin without necessity; ... he foresees that the effect will occur in the way in which it proceeds from its cause: freely if from a free agent, contingently if from a contingent cause, necessarily if from a cause acting under necessity." (Quoted by Nitzsch, "Christliche Lehre," § 73, note.)

ernment are eternally purposed by God so to exist. If blessings are obtained in answer to prayer; if they depend on human diligence, as a harvest on the work of the farmer; if men can please God and win heaven only by lives of faith and love, these conditions, actually existing in the government of God, are conditions eternally purposed by him. It is often objected that the doctrine of God's purpose is incompatible with any real efficacy in prayer and the use of means. But the contrary is true. God's eternal purpose establishes indissolubly the connection of prayer, effort, and right living with the obtaining of his blessing. "God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth."1

Whatever are the reasons for which God acts in any case are also the reasons why he eternally purposes so to act. All the difficulties in the doctrine of God's purpose are equally difficulties in the doctrine of his government. We escape none of them by denying his purpose. It is a fact that the gospel of Christ has been preached to some peoples and not to others; that some men who have the gospel accept Christ and others do not. The difficulty is always in what God does, not in the fact that he eternally purposes to do so. And whatever explains and removes the difficulties and objections as to what God does in his government equally explains and removes those pertaining to God's purpose. In fact the doctrine of God's purpose in itself gives us relief and a ground of peace in the face of difficulties and objections. We know it to be a purpose of perfect wisdom and love. On this assurance we can rest in faith and peace in the presence of difficulties which at the time we are unable to remove and objections to which we do not yet see the answer.

A theory has been proposed, in the interest of human free agency, that God determines the end or result, but that the means or agency in effecting it are not included in his purpose. But this dissolves all dependence of the end on the means, of the result on the finite agency, and reduces not only human agency, but that of all finite powers to an empty and illusive show. On the other hand, in seeing results depending on their own agency, and on means of their own devising, men are ready to forget their dependence therein on God. A well-known preacher, according to the printed report of his sermon, has recently said:

1 2 Thess. ii. 13.

"A merchant may attain his own ends without the assistance of divine power, but the farmer looks to the God of the soil." But the true doctrine is that God's providential purpose and government extend both to the means and the end, both to the finite agency and its effect.

II. PROOF OF THE DOCTRINE. - It remains to consider the reasons for accepting the doctrine as true.

1. Considered philosophically it is a reasonable doctrine. Difficulties and objections have arisen from misapprehensions of its meaning, from identifying it with false theories and arguments in its explanation and defence, and from attempting to define with too minute particularity the methods and details of God's action and purpose in his government. For example, in this country the doctrine of God's sovereignty was supposed to involve as essential the theory of determinism as set forth by President Edwards in his "Treatise on the Will." So the science of electricity is not to be identified with the theory either of Franklin or Dufay, or even with the present theory of molecular action in an ether. The facts of electricity remain though the theories change. The doctrine of God's sovereignty, as rightly stated, is free from these sources of difficulty and objection, and commends itself to the reason as a clear and indubitable philosophical truth.

First, the doctrine, as stated in this chapter, is involved in the idea of God and of his relation to the universe. It has been shown that God's right to govern is in the fact that he is God; that it is essential in his Godhood and inseparable from it; that the fact that he is the creator of the universe, fully understood, implies that he is Lord of all. Because he is the Creator, the system of things which we call the universe depends always on him for its existence. Every individual depends on God for his constitution and for his environment, and to a great extent for his own peculiar condition and circumstances. And in the spiritual life every created person is dependent on God for his gracious acceptance and influence, and every sinner is dependent on him for redemption and forgiveness. If God had acted differently in creating and constituting the universe, if he had given to the individual a different constitution and environment, if he had brought him into being under different circumstances from those which make his peculiar condition, if he had withheld from his

rational creatures the knowledge of his love, if he had wrought no redemption for sinners, or having wrought it had left them ignorant of it, — on any of these suppositions the course of the free agent's action would have been different from what it actually has been.1 In one or another of these ways the actuality of every being and event is dependent on God and included in his purpose. And the reason why God has not changed his action in any of these particulars is not any lack of power, if abstracted from reason, to do it, but because he is perfect in wisdom and love and all which he actually does in creating and governing the universe is, by his own eternal free choice, in exact agreement with the principles and laws of reason and the progressive realization of its ideals of perfection and good. Any change in the actual course of God's action would be both unwise and unloving, both foolish and wrong. Thus God's sovereignty is universal; it extends to every event, because every event is directly or indirectly dependent on God's action. Every event is dependent on God at least in the sense that without God's action the event would never have occurred. In this sense the free acts of men are included under the purpose of God, as the ultimate ground of their actuality; but not as the immediate efficiency in causing them, nor as imposing on the man any obligation nor establishing any necessity so to act. On the contrary the purpose of God insures that the man shall freely determine what he will do and freely exert his own power in doing it.

Secondly, the doctrine of God's universal purpose is essential as the only basis for the possibility of any free will, moral law, and responsibility, or moral system in the universe. It is the doctrine that the universe is ultimately grounded in rationality and freedom, not in blind force, necessity, or fate, nor in arbitrary and capricious will, almighty but not regulated by law nor determined in wisdom and love. If this doctrine is not true, if the universe is not ultimately grounded in rationality and freedom, then it is grounded in blind fate or capricious almightiness. But if rationality and freedom are excluded from the ultimate ground of the universe, from its first cause and origin, they are excluded everywhere. If they do not come in at the beginning, they can

1 Leibnitz uses the illustration that if Tarquin the Proud had been born the son of a shepherd in Thrace, he might have spent his life in feeding sheep and never have committed the crimes of which he was actually guilty. VOL. I.—36