availing itself of the
ambiguities of language. They would have us view the creation as a
species of clock, or other machinery, which, being once made and wound
up, will for a time perform its movements without the assistance or even
presence of its maker. But reasons press too far the analogy between the
Creator and an artisan. So excellent a man as Baxter was misled by this
hypothesis, which evidently is as derogatory to God as occasionalism is
fatal to the moral agency of man.

3. The authors of the third scheme respecting the mode in which
Providence permits sin sought to be "Eclectics" or to find a path
intermediate between Mechanism and Occasionalism. In their judgment, man
is actuated by God, and yet is at the same time active himself. God
gives man the power of action, and preserves these powers every moment,
but he is not the efficient cause of free actions themselves. This they
say, is involved in the very idea of a moral being, which would cease to
be moral if it were subjected to the control of necessity, and not
suffered to choose and to do what it saw to be the best according to the
laws of freedom. But it is asked, why did God create men free, and
therefore fallible? It were presumption to think of answering this
question adequately. It belongs to the deep things of God. But, among
the possible reasons, we may mention, that if no fallible beings had
been created, there could have been no virtue in the universe; for
virtue implies probation, and probation a liability to temptation and
sin. Again, if some beings had not become sinful, the most glorious
attributes of God would never have been so fully exerted and displayed.
How could His wisdom and mercy and grace have been adequately
manifested, except by suffering a portion of His creatures to become
such as to demand the exercise of those attributes? How else could He
have wrought the miracle of educing good from evil? In this connection
we may allude to the third chapter of Romans, where as in other
passages, it is declared, that the good which evil may be over-ruled to
produce, cannot palliate, much less excuse, the guilt of sinners, or of
those who say, "Let us do evil that good may come."

Among the proofs of Divine Providence may be reckoned the following:--1.
One argument in proof of Providence is analogous to one mode of proving
a creation. If we cannot account for the existence of the world without
supposing its coming into existence, or beginnin