But suppose the man were to rise at midnight, enter the dwelling of a neighbor, massacre him, and then rob and burn his house; and suppose the motive influencing him to so foul a deed, depended upon an assemblage of incidents and circumstances which had been operating from his childhood, and over which he had no more control than over the force of gravity in his fall from the precipice; where would be the difference in the two cases? Why, there would be this important difference, that the force of gravity would not conquer his desire not to fall, while the incidents and circumstances, which gave strength to the motive leading him to commit the murder, would overcome his desire not to commit it. In the one case, he would be forced against his will, and in the other, his will would be led captive.

But then, these incidents and circumstances were arranged in that precise manner, without his choice, and without the least power on his part, to produce a different arrangement: and it was done too, when his heart was so remote from any intention of murder, that if he had been consulted, and could have known the foul deed to which they were carrying him, he would have chosen a different arrangement, just as much as he would have chosen to resist the power of gravity, so as to prevent the consequences of falling to the bottom of the precipice. What is the difference, therefore, between the two cases? Why, in this view, it is reduced simply to this, that though the man's desires are equally against the force that is conducting him to the unhappy termination in both cases; in the one case he is sensible of that force, so as to be able to choose concerning it, and in the other he is not. He can be so sensible of the force which is hurrying him to the bottom of the precipice, as to wish that it might be counteracted, while the arrangement of the incidents and circumstances leading him to commit the murder, was so

entirely beyond the reach of his knowledge, that there was a natural impossibility in the way of his having any choice about it. The motion of falling might be in itself pleasant, and independent of the hurt occasioned by its termination, might be as much an object of his choice, as the current of influences bearing him forward to the commission of the murder. But with the knowledge of that hurt in his mind, he cannot choose it; nor with the knowledge of the murder, before the disposition to commit it is confirmed, could he choose to yield himself to the influence leading to its commission. His natural

ability to know the result in the one, and his natural inability to know it in the other, is all that remains to account for the difference of choice in the two cases.

How do natural and moral necessity, therefore, seem allied to, and confounded with each other? How mysterious that a government of law, with all its imputations of merit and demerit, and all its actual awards of desert and punishment, should have no other basis than this intactible distinction. It seems to us after all, that one who is eagerly desirous of penetrating to the extreme source of moral action, or of those volitions which God esteems virtuous or vicious, can obtain little satisfaction from this theory of moral causation. It is too much like the proposition, that a particle of matter may be infinitely divided; which, though abstractly and mathematically true, is to us practically impossible, and so, difficult' to be turned to any purpose of utility. He finds in himself an instinctive consciousness, that the things wherein he is blame or praise-worthy, are, in some unknown manner suspended upon his own agency, to a degree that sets this theory at defiance. Not a few also, who resign themselves wholly to the results of this mode of reasoning, as facts prove, fall under the influence of a secret and insidious fatalism; re

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."+ 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.