e,"
but the corruptions by which they have been dishonoured. They
maintain, that on the absolute predestinarian scheme, there is no
room for grace, such as the Gospel exhibits to the sinful and the
lost; and that their own views are not only more accordant with the
justice, but with the unmerited and infinite mercy of God. They
ascribe all true holiness to the Divine Spirit.

[2] Dr. Coplestone, now the Bishop of Llandaff, denies that the
foreknowledge of an event proves the _event to be necessary_. "_We_
may be unable to conceive how a thing not necessary in its nature
can be foreknown; for _our_ foreknowledge is in general limited by
that circumstance, and is more or less perfect in proportion to the
fixed or necessary nature of the things we contemplate, with which
nature we become acquainted by experience, and are thus able to
anticipate a great variety of events: but to subject the knowledge
of God to any such limitation is surely absurd and unphilosophical,
as well as impious; and, therefore, to mix up the idea of God's
foreknowledge with any quality in the nature of the things
foreknown, is even less excusable than to be guilty of that
confusion when speaking of ourselves."

But, with due deference to his lordship, this does not contradict
the statement in the text, that we are ignorant of any principle on
which _such prescience_ can be explained. Assuming, indeed, that any
events are contingent, that human actions proceed from freedom, and
not from necessity, we cannot deny that they come within the range
of infinite knowledge.

But the philosophical necessarian does not grant this postulate. He
assumes the existence of an infinite mind, to whose knowledge all
events are open, and thence infers the _necessity_ of these events.
He pleads that omniscience and contingency are incongruous ideas,
and, on the ground of pure metaphysics, it would be difficult to
refute him. But we demolish his theory by an appeal to facts. We
oppose the moral constitution and history of man, to the plausible
speculations of philosophy. In other words, the mere metaphysician
is a fatalist; and his position, in the present state of our
intellectual philosophy, can be successfully attacked only by an
appeal to facts and consciousness, and by moral argument. That sound
metaphysics and just moral reasoning cannot really be at variance is
certain, since there cannot exist contradictory truths. Our
metaphysics therefore are wrong, or the