events. He ordained that one man should believe the
Holy Scriptures, and reverence them, and that another man should,
at the same time, deny, and hate, and vilify them. He ordained
that men should at one period of their lives preach the gospel,
and write in favor of Christianity, and at another period become
infidel lecturers and disputants. He decreed that some should
believe the Calvinistic doctrine of decrees, and teach it, and
that others should, at the same time, regard it as false and
oppose it. He has ordained that men shall take opposite sides on
all great questions, religious, philosophical, or political. He
ordained the fugitive slave law and the recent Nebraska and
Kansas enactment, and all the opposition from ministers and
laymen, with which these measures have been regarded. He has
ordained that one party shall laud them as just and patriotic,
and that another party shall condemn and hate them as diabolical.
He ordained the arrest of that man on the suspicion of murder,
with all the conflicting opinions as to his guilt or innocence,
the contradictory testimony of the witnesses, the contrary
pleadings of the counsel, the verdict of the jury pronouncing him
guilty, the sentence of the judge condemning him to death, and
the pardon of the governor under the full conviction of his
innocence. All the conflicting opinions and acts in the fiercest
controversy that ever raged, this theory traces up to the Divine
foreordination.

21. It must have appeared to the audience, by this time, that the
character of God is fearfully involved in this inquiry.

(1). We have already seen that this theory draws after it the
logical consequences that God is the author of sin, or, if not
the author of it in the strict and proper sense of the term, at
least the plotter--the prime mover of it; that he prefers sin to
holiness in every instance in which sin takes place; that he
regards sin as the necessary means of the greatest good; that he
has, at the same time, two hostile wills relative to the same
thing. And now what shall we say of his _wisdom_, when we find
him decreeing acts, and bringing them to pass, and yet,
peremptorily forbidding them--enjoining acts, by formal solemn
legislation, which, from all eternity he has foreordained shall
never be performed? When we find him ordaining measures for the
promotion, and measures for the counteraction, of his own plans?
When we find him ordaining all the contradictions and vacillat