By what infatuation are men
induced to rely on any supposed distinctions in favour of
themselves, when they have removed the only grounds of confidence in
the righteous administration of the Deity?

It is an impressive feature in the works of rigid predestinarians,
that their own minds seem to partake of the fearful gloom with which
they depict the divine attributes. They appear awed and terror
-stricken with the stern aspect of the great Being whose moral
character they have distorted, until they tremble at the creations
of their own imagination. They write as men whose minds are rendered
morbid with mysterious fears, rather than brightened into holy
gladness, by a filial love of God. They seem to be vindicating with
servile dread a character, whose wrath they would deprecate, and
whose doubtful favour they would propitiate on their own behalf.
Even when they express their persuasion of their own interest in
"special grace," it is more in the spirit of men who are conscious
of being the favoured objects of capricious tyranny, than of that
serene and hopeful and cheering confidence which inspires the devout
heart, when it contemplates through a happier medium the beneficent
and universal Father. Nor is this unnatural. The moral character of
the Deity, as misrepresented by Calvinism, both unsettles all our
ideas of rectitude, and renders insecure our hold upon Infinite
Goodness.

That the mental disease of Cowper was intensely aggravated by
depressing views of the divine character, which he received from
Newton and others, and that the consolations which might have
soothed his mind, from a scriptural view of the grace of the gospel,
were neutralised or destroyed by his supposing himself the victim of
an _irreversible decree_, is clear to every impartial reader of his
most interesting and most melancholy life. Yet of his piety we have
this touching proof, that, amidst the wildest aberrations of his
intellect, and while oppressed with the conviction that he was
numbered with the reprobate, his persuasion of the rectitude of the
divine government never wavered; he acquiesced in the doom which he
believed to await him; and declared that if it were the will of God
that he should perish, he would not lift a finger to reverse his
fate! Who would not lament, that a mind thus tempered to pious
confidence, should be taught by a pernicious creed to distrust its
own interest in the love of God--a delusion which passed away only