owledge involved
foreordination. If so, the matter may be easily settled thus:--Does
God foresee that men will sin? Of course He does. But if
foreknowledge involves foreordination, then by the laws of logic He
has foreordained sin. Syllogistically thus:--God only foreknows what
He has fixed; but He foreknows sin, ergo, He fixed sin. We cannot
resist this conclusion if we hold the premises. The Confession says
He has foreordained everything, yet is He not the author of sin. But
is it not clear as day that the author of a decree is the author of
the thing decreed? David was held responsible for his decree
regarding Uriah, and justly so. Had he been as clever as the authors
of the Confession he could have parried that homethrust of Nathan,
"Thou art the man." If everything that comes to pass was
foreordained; David might have said, "I beg pardon, Nathan; it is
true that I made the decree to have Uriah killed, but I did not kill
him. Is it not the case that the author of a decree is not
responsible for the sin of the decree?" Would Nathan have understood
this logic? We think not. But if the Confession had been then in
existence (if the anachronism may be pardoned), he might have
appealed to it against Nathan; and we never should have had that
awful threnody--the fifty-first Psalm. There is, then, no escape
from the conclusion, that if everything that comes to pass has been
foreordained, so also must it be the case with sin, for it also
comes to pass. I open the page of history, and find it bloated with
tears and blood. It is full of robberies, massacres, and murders. As
specimens, look at the Murder of John Brown by Claverhouse; the
massacre of St. Bartholomew; the sack of Magdeburg, when the Croats
amused themselves with throwing children into the flames, and
Pappenheim's Walloons with stabbing infants at their mothers'
breasts. Who ordained these and a thousand such horrid deeds? The
Confession says that God ordained them, for He foreordains
whatsoever comes to pass. Tilly, the queen-mother, the infamous
Catherine de Medici, Charles IX., the bloody "Clavers" were mere
puppets. The Confession goes past all these, and says that God fixed
them to take place. This is nothing else, in effect, than to place
an almighty devil on the throne of the universe. This is strong
language, but it is time, and more than time, that sickly
dilettanteism should be left behind, and this gross libel on the
Creator should be utterly rejected.