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PRESIDENT EDWARDS.

2. Yes, it is so—even if the cause is in our own want of comprehension, or our puerility or insipidity in contact with his great mind. You know how our school of Humean infidels once claimed him?

1. I do; but it was like their impiety and their impudence to do it.

2. It was; still, they were very specious. His doctrine of moral necessity, especially, in his great ESSAY ON the Will, seemed almost to allow their premises. They construed him as virtually with them, in those philosophical views, in which they seem to superinduce a plausible fatalism, and effectually to preclude the accountable free-agency of men. Hence they lauded his great talents, and appropriated his eminence, as if it was a support and a sanction to their boasted philosophy.

1. Ay, to their purblind infidelity. I wonder if one of them ever read his ESSAY through, ever tried to comprehend the scope of it, its sense and plan, and the real drift of his argumentation? I doubt if they ever did such a thing!

2. Are you, then, quite with it and for it?

1. Pretty nearly. I think it has faults, infelicities, and weaknesses, and also that no mere scholasticism can well comprehend its author. One must see his great object, his subservient method, and not make him an offender for a word, nor criticise too literally or too sternly his technicalities or his terminology. It is a polemico-theological performance, and refers to the great Arminian controversy—to what he conceived the grand point of the collisions at the Synod of Dort, and to its resulting consequences in the Protestant theology of the world.

2. And his chosen type of controversy was highly metaphysical and psychological. He intends by the analysis of mind, and the philosophy of its moral acts, to demonstrate the truth of generic Calvinism.

1. I think so. Arminians are very fond of asserting that man is a free agent—a truism that no one disputes. Yet in

THE CLIQUE AND FOLLY OF HUME.

93 what his freedom consists, and whether it is consistent with the purposes and the providences of God, or how it can be, they are not the men to tell. Hence they often supersede those purposes, to keep their favorite dogma, in their own sense of it; just as Antinomians sometimes deny the freedom of the will, or rather of human agents, that they may keep their own view and vision instar omnium of the decrees. Now Edwards believed the two together as perfectly true, each of them, and as perfectly harmonious, both of them. He was no hobby-rider or mule-driver, nor was he a man of only one idea.

2. Yes; and he is surely not far from right in the main.

1. He truly is; and your great Dugald Stuart, I hear, has allowed as much, nay, has said more; namely, that it has never been answered, and probably never will be answered —that is, refuted. If so, remember, it was an American that did it. For one, I own my great obligations to him; for I early saw his meaning, and liked it, not repudiating so grand a master-piece because minute criticism, with flies' eyes, can see some few blemishes or incongruities possibly, in so imperial and magnificent a pile of metaphysico-theological reasoning.

2. I think the grand objection among us is his views of moral necessity, as repulsive and fatalizing—the very reason of Hume and his clique seeming to like and claim him, saying, the great American metaphysician was with them.

1. When a friend wrote, and told him of that appropriation, you remember, surely, his noble reply. They could not claim him afterward. By-the-way, I wonder at the inaptness of some great and good men, even in their scientific statements, to understand him. They stumble and object so much at the idea of moral necessity! It consists plainly with freedom; we are perfectly voluntary in it; it is, under God, all of our own making. Look at God himself—He CAN NOT lie-it is IMPOSSIBLE, we are told. Well, does this remove

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MORAL NECESSITY AND FREEDOM.

or impair his freedom? Preposterous! The quintessence of nonsense! No other being is so perfectly free, or so morally necessitated to do right, and act with such infinite and absolute wisdom in all things.

Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, in his Essays, was much at one with Hume; and Edwards, pronouncing their views infidel and corrupt, vindicates himself, in his letters to Scotland, from their abhorred communion. He declares "that such a necessity as attends the acts of men's will is more properly called certainty than necessity; it being no other than the certain connection between the subject and predicate of the proposition which affirms their existence." He says, also, "I have abundantly expressed it as my mind, that man, in his moral actions, has true liberty; and that the moral necessity which universally takes place is not in the least inconsistent with any thing that is properly called liberty, and with the utmost liberty that can be desired, or that can possibly exist or be conceived of." What, then, do those wise men mean who cavil at his use of the term necessity? The words italicized above are by his own pen. Do they say that certainty, because God can see it in its future, is therefore fatalism, befitting more the porch of Xeno, or the throne of the supreme mufti at Constantinople, than the theology of a Christian philosopher? Edwards was infinitely far removed from Fatalist, Stoic, Antinomian, dotard, and fool! If God eternally foresees our actions with the foreknowledge of vision, he foresees as well that they are ours; that we are free, and voluntary, and so accountable in them; and that their evil is our own sin, and as such punishable by justice, or pardonable by grace, in their proper nature.

Why, that

2. It seems, indeed, to be easy as you state it. 1. Well, dear sir, and what says himself of it? all he means is, that the future actions of men, all of them, are objects of historical vision to God. Yet they are perfectly free. God sees them infallibly and universally, good and

CERTAINTY OF FREE ACTIONS.

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bad, from eternity as future, just as they are, and just as he sees them all, to eternity, as past. So that certainty is the key to all he means-" certainty" is his own word, in reply to the letter. God predicts often the free moral actions of men. He described those of Judas ten or eleven centuries before he was born. He predicted the sins of Peter, emphatically, a few hours before he did them. So of many others. Well, this was not to take their free agency from them—yet it was necessary that their actions should seem to fulfill the prophecies; and they did occur; and they were perfectly free too! I fully believe with him—and never saw a man yet that could logically meet his argument and refute it. Indeed, I believe that moral necessity is not only consistent with freedom, but essential to it, and that the Arminian idea of freedom is nothing better than metaphysical foolery on stilts—it is, that absolute contingency, in eventuation, is necessary to free moral agency every where! If it were-God has no freedom; since there is no contingency at all in his eternal agency. And must a man be more free than God, in order to be accountable, or a moral agent, or—an Arminian? They may be good men, possibly, who assert or imply this, in spite of their reasonings; we must be quite excused for thinking them far enough from wise ones. They are quite free enough in their nonsense and their drivel—and so is God, in seeing it, and in despising it, from eternity and to eternity; for eternity is the lifetime of God, the habitation of his glorious being.

2. Your New England divines, I think, are distinguished for the metaphysical cast of their theology.

1. They are; and so are your Scotch divines; only that the mode of your metaphysical inquiry and preaching is of a different type from ours. I have witnessed some of your Scotch metaphysics in the pulpit; and as comparisons might be perilous, if not odious, I only say that ours is different, is American; more conformed to that of our illustrious Ed

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OUR REVOLUTION REPRODUCED.

wards, and his illustrious grandson, Dwight, than to your vernacular models. Which is the more scriptural, the more masterly, the more useful, I may not affirm, whatever is my opinion.

2. You deal possibly too much in metaphysical theology. Had it not a real or a latent influence in your late ecclesi astical explosions? Come, tell me fairly now all about that controversy, its antecedents and its results; for you set the example, six years earlier than we followed it in ours.

bad

1. Yes; but not, I hope, like France, making a bad, a very copy of our Revolution, or a worse reproduction of something not very like ours, about six years after ours was over. 2. I am quite desirous to understand yours of 1837 and 1838 and onward, to see if there be any or what similitude between yours and ours.

1. Perhaps I am not the right one to tell you, for I am decisively on one side, and that the constitutional; protesting with all my soul against the coup d'état of perjury and wickedness by which it was done, even if good men did it! Still, one of the other side might be no more impartial, no more trustworthy, no more well-informed or correct. Besides, I will endeavor to tell the truth, as I surely believe it; though not unaware that some, who, I think, are themselves badly committed, interested, and unscrupulous, will condemn, both à priori and à posteriori, whatever I say, in the main, connected with it. I expect no quarter, and no justice, and especially no brotherly kindness, from some of their eminences, who chiefly did the sin; or, should I receive any proper demonstration of such qualities at their hand-the hand of some I say, not all, or the majority of them—I should be encouraged in my hopes of the approaching millennium.

2. I never could properly see what you had, comparatively, in America, about which to get up such a quarrel, such a revolutionary civil war, in your ecclesiastical relations; what were the causes?

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