ny satisfactory 'sensible' reply to this, or any answer that does
not fly higher than 'sense' can follow, and pierce into "the thick
clouds" of decried metaphysics! For no fair reply can be imagined, but
one which would find the root of the moral evil, the true [Greek:
ponaeron], in this very impossibility.

Ib. p. 249.

'Cunningham.' But how does all this discourse about sacrifices and the
natural light show that your faith does not ascribe
injustice to God in putting an innocent person to death
for the transgressions of the guilty?

'Shep.' Was Christ innocent?

'Cunn.' 'He was without sin.'

'Shep.' And he was put to death by the appointment and
predetermination of God?

'Cunn.' The Jews put him to death.

'Shep.' Do not evade the question. Was he not 'the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world'? Was he not 'so delivered by the
determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, that the Jews,
having taken him, by wicked hands crucified and slew him?'

'Cunn'. And what then?

'Shep'. Nothing; but that you are to answer, as well as I, for saying
that God predetermined the death of this only innocent person.

I am less pleased with this volume than with any of the preceding. Ask
your own heart and conscience whether (for instance,) they are satisfied
with this defence 'duri per durius': or whether frightening a modest
query into silence by perverting it into an accusation of the Almighty,
by virtue of a conclusion borrowed from the Calvinistic theory of
Predestination, is not more in the spirit of Job's comforters, than
becomes a minister of the Apostolic Church of England and Ireland? Such
arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may
rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis's knife, the one
of which was poisoned. Leave them to Calvin, or those who dare
appropriate Calvin's words, that "God's absolute will is the only rule
of his justice;"--thus dividing the divine attributes. Yet Calvin
himself distinguishes the hidden from the revealed God, even as the
Greek Fathers distinguished the [Greek: thelaema Theou], the absolute
ground of all being, from the [Greek: Boulae tou Theou], as the cause
and disposing providence of all existence.

But I disapprove of the plan and spirit of this work, (Deism Revealed.)
The cold-hearted, worldly-minded, cunning Deist, or t