and more striking arguments. If we had nothing better to oppose to
it, we might indeed neutralize its effect by a counter-argument of Edwards
himself, which we find in his celebrated work on the will. He there says,
that the virtuousness of every virtuous act or choice depends upon its own
nature, and not upon its origin or cause. If we must refer every virtuous
act, says he, to something in us that is virtuous as its antecedent, we
must likewise refer that antecedent to some other virtuous origin or
cause; and so on _ad infinitum_. Thus we should be compelled to trace
virtue back from step to step, until we had quite driven it out of the
world, and excluded it from the universality of things.(90)

Now this argument seems just as plausible as that which we have produced
from the same author, in his work on Original Sin. Let us lay them
together, and contemplate the joint result. According to one, the
character of every virtuous act depends upon the virtuousness of the
principle or disposition whence it proceeds; according to the other, it
depends upon its own nature, and not at all upon anything in its origin,
or cause, or antecedent. According to one, we must trace every virtuous
act to a virtuous principle, and the virtuous principle itself to the
necessitating act of God; according to the other, we must look no higher
to determine the character of an act than its own nature; and if we
proceed to its origin or cause to determine its character, we shall find
no stopping-place. We shall not trace it up to God, as before, but we
shall banish all virtue quite out of the world, and exclude it from the
universality of things. According to one argument, there can be no virtue
in the world, unless it be caused to exist, in the first place, by the
necessitating, creative act of the Almighty; and according to the other,
the virtuousness of every virtuous act depends upon its own nature, and is
wholly independent of the question respecting its origin or cause. The
solution of these inconsistencies and contradictions, we shall leave to
the followers and admirers of President Edwards.(91)

But we have something better, we trust, to oppose to President Edwards
than his own arguments. If his logic be good for anything, it will prove
that God is the author of sin as well as of virtue. For it is as much the
common notion of mankind that every sinful act must proceed from a sinful
disposition or principle, as it is that every virtuous a