arians. Though vehemently condemned by
Calvin himself, unanswerably refuted by Leibnitz, sneered at by Edwards
the younger, and pronounced utterly inadequate by Dr. John Dick; yet, as
we have seen, is it now held up as "the Calvinistic idea of the freedom of
the will."

We do not wonder that such a definition of free-will should have been
adopted by atheizing philosophers, such as Hume and Hobbes, for example;
because we cannot suppose them to have been penetrated with any very
profound design to uphold the cause of human responsibility, or to
vindicate the immaculate purity of the divine glory. But that it should
have been accepted with such unquestioning simplicity by a large body of
Christian divines, having the great interests of the moral world at heart,
is, we cannot but think, a sufficient ground for the most profound
astonishment and regret; for, surely, to plant the great cause of human
responsibility on a foundation so slender, on a fallacy so palpable, on a
position so utterly untenable, is to expose it to the victorious assaults
of its weakest enemy and invader.

Section II.

The scheme of necessity makes God the author of sin.

The necessitarian, in his attempts to vindicate the purity of God, has not
been more successful than in his endeavours to establish the freedom and
accountability of man. If, according to his scheme, the Supreme Ruler of
the world be the primal cause of all things, the volitions of men
included; it certainly seems exceedingly difficult to conceive, that he is
not implicated in the sin of the world. And this difficulty, so appalling
at first view, remains just as great after all that the most enlightened
advocates of that scheme have advanced as it was before.

We have witnessed the efforts of a Leibnitz, an Edwards, and a Chalmers,
to repel this objection to the scheme of necessity; and if we mistake not,
we have seen how utterly ineffectual they have proved to break its force,
or resist its influence. The sum and substance of that defence is, as we
have seen, that God may do evil that good may come; a defence which,
instead of vindicating the purity of the divine proceeding, represents it
as having been governed by the most corrupt maxim of the most corrupt
system of casuistry the world has ever seen. It darkens, rather than
illuminates, that profound and portentous obscurity of the system of the
world, arising from the origin and existence