rce of truth.

And what are its recommendations to those who embrace it?

1. Calvinism is both exciting and sedative, exciting to the
imagination, and sedative to the conscience. Thus it is accommodated
to two of the leading principles of human nature, the love of the
awful, the terrific, the deeply tragic, and the natural anxiety
which all men feel, to be rid of the consciousness of guilt and of
personal danger. Nothing can exceed the tremendous scenes opened to
the imagination by that system of theology, which dooms to perdition
the great mass of human beings, who are permitted by their Creator
to sport or suffer upon earth through a few rapid revolutions of
time, and are then swept away for ever into an abyss of ruin; while,
with confounding and dreadful mystery, the Author of their being is
represented as the great agent in this work of appalling desolation.
To redeem his character for mercy, He rescues an elect few, but
leaves the devoted multitude without pity and without hope, to
everlasting torment. Whether we contemplate this fearful character
of the Deity, or endeavour to realize the scenes which await the
departure of lost souls, or attempt in imagination to identify
ourselves with the happy spirits of the redeemed, who have escaped,
_they know not why_, the general destruction of all that is dear to
man, we must be sensible that all the ordinary conceptions of the
human mind are comparatively powerless for pity, or terror, or
intense expectation of what is to come.

At the same time its tendency, excepting in the case of a few
sensitive and tender spirits, is to deaden the consciousness of
guilt, to still the remonstrances of the self-convicted mind, and to
enable men of no religion and of no morals to hear these doctrines
proclaimed from the pulpit without any salutary disquietude of
heart. They do not really believe them, or they find in them an
apology for their corruption. It has sometimes been said, by way of
severe reflection, of a moral sermon, that it could not be the
Gospel, for that a Socinian might have heard it without offence. The
objection is very absurd; but what then ought to be the inference
drawn by the same persons, respecting the character of doctrines
which, although in speculation they are fearful and appalling to the
utmost, tend in reality to stupify the moral sense, and can be
listened to by the profane and the profligate with complacency or
apathy? While it explains their popula