hus
Epiphanes. It is a pleasant supposition that a man who did not believe
that God could foretell events, would be awed by the authority of a
text; but Edwards' polemic is almost exclusively directed against the
hated Arminians, and he appears to be unconscious of the existence of a
genuine sceptic. He observes that he has never read Hobbes (v. 260); and
though in another work he makes a brief allusion to Hume, he never
refers to him in these speculations, whilst covering the same ground as
one of the admirable _Essays_.

This simplicity is significant of Edwards' unique position. The doctrine
of Calvinism, by whatever name it may be called, is a mental tonic of
tremendous potency. Whether in its theological dress, as attributing all
events to the absolute decrees of the Almighty, or in its metaphysical
dress, as declaring that some abstract necessity governs the world, or
in the shape more familiar to modern thinkers, in which it proclaims the
universality of what has been called the reign of law, it conquers or
revolts the imagination. It forces us to conceive of all phenomena as so
many links

In the eternal chain
Which none can break, nor slip, nor overreach;

and can, therefore, be accepted only by men who possess the rare power
of combining their beliefs into a logical whole. Most people contrive to
shirk the consequences, either by some of those evasions which, as
Edwards showed, amount to asserting the objective existence of chance,
or more commonly by forbidding their reason to follow the chain of
inferences through more than a few links. The axiom that the cause of a
cause is also the cause of the thing caused, though verbally admitted,
is beyond the reach of most intellects. People are willing to admit that
A is irrevocably joined to B, B to C, and so on to the end of the
alphabet, but they refuse to realise the connection between A and Z. The
annoyance excited by Mr. Buckle's enunciation of some very familiar
propositions, is a measure of the reluctance of the popular imagination
to accept a logical conclusion. When the dogma is associated with a
belief in eternal damnation, the consequences are indeed terrible; and
therefore it was natural that Calvinism should have become an almost
extinct creed, and the dogma have been left to the freethinkers who had
not that awful vision before their eyes. Hobbes, Collins, and Hume, the
three writers with whom the opinion was chiefly associated in Engl