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trary exclusion or selection , and if any fail to realize the blessings of the economy of grace , their Maker is free from their blood . —The whole of this is not , in our opinion , Christianity , though not far from it ; but as it overthrows the doctrines of Election and Reprobation , we are perfectly sure that it is not Calvinism . " These arguments / ' we are told , " supply matter for grave consideration , though they may not be deemed conclusive by every ingenuous inquirer after
truth . They do not proceed on any specific view of the doctrine of Predestination ; but in strict accordance , it is presumed , with the example of the sacred writers in similar cases , they pass by that doctrine , as being" irrelevant to matters which have a practical bearing , and as calculated , in the present state of our knowledge and our faculties , to introduce perplexity into our \ iews of moral responsibility and obligation—a result too frequently realized in the case of those who substitute for the predestination of the Bible , a scheme not essentially different from fatalism . "—P . 23 .
" To obviate the objection made to that scheme of doctrine of which the absolute corruption of man , and the absolute predestination of the elect are the fundamental principles—that it destroys responsibility—theologians have recourse to the distinction between moral and natural inability ; a distinction so just and important , when correctly understood , that it renders the incorrigible sinner self-condemned and ' speechless / Just , however , as the distinction is in itself , and momentous as is the aspect it wears towards the guilty , it does not appear of so easy application to any system as to that which
supposes man to be still a probationer , and the grace of the gospel , in some important sense , a real provision for all . On any other supposition , what is gained by this distinction ? An inability to perform the duties of a religious creature , whether moral or natural , which is confessedly the result , the inevitable result of necessity , originating in circumstances over which the individual has no controul , and antecedent to his existence—an inability to which
he is doomed by the very law and condition of his being—an inahility entailed upon the entire family of man , from the hour 6 T the apostacy of the first sinner—an inability so original and cognate as to be identified with the nature and constitution of the human mind , so that we can as easily imagine the individual to extinguish , by an act of eternal suicide , his own soul ,, as to throw off , by a spontaneous effort , the fetters by which that soul is enthralled : an inability thus superinduced , let it be designated by whatever name , would appear to the common sense of mankind rather as an apology than an aggravation of guilt ; a calamity to be deplored more than a crime to
be punished . In the estimate of a man of plain understanding , unversed in subtle disputations , this moral impotence , obtained by inheritance and absolutely inevitable , would appear , as much as any scheme of fatalism could appear , to be at variance with moral obligation . Least of all would lie acquiesce in the sentence of condemnation passed upon them who reject the Saviour if it should appear that for them he never actually died , being restrained from , undertaking their cause by that exclusive decree which doomed them to die , as they were born , in incorrigible hardness of heart , leaving them victims of stern necessity ., to pass from the cradle to the tomb under the stamp and seal of perdition . "—Pp . 28 , 29 .
Little indeed can the arbitrary and fallacious distinction between moral and natural inability avail to rectify the obliquities of a system like this . The evidence for the existence of a positive necessity being so complete as to exclude all objections , but one method remains of reconciling the actual state of man with the attributes of God , —the belief that all punishment is of a remedial nature , in the next world as well as in this . There is no other escape from the mournful perplexities of Baxter on the one hand , and the dreary vindictiveness of Edwards on the other .
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592 Hull's Discourses .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1830, page 592, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2588/page/8/
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