ue holiness,
is not only to be the ideal of perfect goodness, but He must be the God
of the Calvinists, who fulfils the stipulations of a strange legal
bargain, and the God of the Jews, who sentences whole nations to
massacre for the crimes of their ancestors. Edwards has hitherto been
really protesting against that lower conception of God which is latent
in at least the popular versions of Catholic or Arminian theology, and
to which Calvinism opposes a loftier view. God, on this theory, is not
really almighty, for the doctrine of free-will places human actions and
their results beyond His control. He is scarcely omniscient, for, like
human rulers, He judges by actions, not by the intrinsic nature of the
soul, and therefore distributes His rewards and punishments on a system
comparable to that of mere earthly jurisprudence. He is at most the
infallible judge of actions, not the universal ordainer of events and
distributor of life and happiness. Edwards' profound conviction of the
absolute sovereignty of God leads him to reject all such feeble
conceptions. But he has now to tell us where the Divine influence has
actually displayed itself; and his view becomes strangely narrowed.
Instead of confessing that all good gifts come from God, he infers that
those which do not come from his own God must be radically vicious.
Already, as we have seen, in virtue of his leading principle, he has
denied to all natural affections the right to be truly virtuous. Unless
they involve a conscious reference to God, they are but delusive
resemblances of the reality. He admits that the natural man can in
various ways produce very fair imitations of true virtue. By help of
association of ideas, for example, or by the force of sympathy, it is
possible that benevolence may become pleasing and malevolence
displeasing, even when our own interest is not involved (ii. 436). Nay,
there is a kind of moral sense natural to man, which consists in a
certain preception of the harmony between sin and punishment, and which
therefore does not properly spring from self-love. This moral sense may
even go so far as to recognise the propriety of yielding all to the God
from whom we receive everything (ii. 443), and the justice of the
punishment of sinners. And yet this natural conscience does not imply
the existence of a 'truly virtuous taste or determination of the mind to
relish and delight in the essential beauty of true virtue, arising from
a virtuous benevo