, what they have seemed to themselves to preserve
and maintain. We have seen, in the first chapter of this work, in what
manner this has been done by them; it now remains to take a view of the
subject, in connexion with the point under consideration.

The man who confounds the sensibility with the will should, indeed, have
no difficulty in reconciling the divine agency with the human. If the
state of the mind in willing is purely passive, like a state of the mind
in feeling; then to say that it is produced by the power of God, would
create no difficulty whatever. Hence, the great difficulty of reconciling
the human with the divine agency, which has puzzled and perplexed so many,
should not exist for one who identifies the will with the sensibility; and
it would exist for no one holding this psychology, if there were not more
in the operations of his nature than in the developments of his system.
Perhaps no one ever more completely lost sight of the true characteristic
of the manifestations of the will, by thrusting them behind the phenomena
of the sensibility, than President Edwards; and hence the difficulty in
question seemed to have no existence for him. So far from troubling
himself about the line which separates the human agency from the divine,
he calmly and quietly speaks as if such a line had no existence. According
to his view, the divine agency encircles all, and man is merely the
subject of its influence. It is true, he uses the terms active and
actions, as applicable to man and his exertions; but yet he regards his
very acts, his volitions, as being produced by God. "In efficacious
grace," says he, "God does all, and we do all. God produces all, and we
act all. For that is what he produces; namely, our own acts." Now I think
Edwards could not have used such language, if he had attached any other
idea to the term act, than what really belongs to it when it is applied,
as it often is, to the passive states of the intelligence and the
sensibility. An _act_ of the intellect, or an _act_ of the affections, may
be produced by the power of God; but not an act of the will. For, as the
Princeton Review well says, "a necessary volition is an absurdity, a thing
inconceivable."

It is scarcely necessary to add, that in causing all real human agency to
disappear before the divine sovereignty, Edwards merely reproduced the
opinion of Calvin; which he endeavoured to establish, not by a fierce,
unreasoning dogmatism, but upo