Dr. Channing.
He says of such views:
“They take from us our Father in heaven, and substitute a stern and unjust Lord. Our filial love and reverence rise up against them. We say, touch any thing but the perfections of God. Cast no stain on that spotless purity and loveliness. We can endure any errors but those which subvert or unsettle the conviction of God's paternal goodness. Urge not upon us a system [pg 038]which makes existence a curse, and wraps the universe in gloom. If I and my beloved friends and my whole race have come from the hands of our Creator wholly depraved, irresistibly propense to all evil and averse to all good—if only a portion are chosen to escape from this miserable state, and if the rest are to be consigned, by the Being who gave us our depraved and wretched nature, to endless torments in inextinguishable flames—then do I think that nothing remains but to mourn in anguish of heart; then existence is a curse, and the Creator is——. O, my merciful Father! I can not speak of thee in the language which this system would suggest. No! thou hast been too kind to me to deserve this reproach from my lips. Thou hast created me to be happy; thou callest me to virtue and piety, because in these consists my felicity; and thou wilt demand nothing from me but what thou givest me ability to perform!”
The following is from the pen of a celebrated writer educated in the Baptist denomination, who finally became a Universalist:
John Foster.
“I acknowledge my inability (I would say it reverently) to admit this belief together with a belief in the divine goodness—the belief that ‘God is love,’ that his tender mercies are over all his works. Goodness, benevolence, charity, as ascribed in supreme perfection to him, can not mean a quality foreign to all human conceptions of goodness. It must be something analogous in principle to what himself has defined and required as goodness in his moral creatures, that, in adoring the divine goodness, we may not be worshiping an ‘unknown God.’ But, if so, how would all our ideas be confounded while contemplating him bringing, of his own sovereign will, a race of creatures into existence in such a condition that they certainly will and must—must by their nature and circumstances—go wrong and be miserable, unless prevented by especial grace, which is the privilege of only a small portion of them, and at the same time affixing on their delinquency a doom of which it is infinitely beyond the highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror.
“It amazes me to imagine how thoughtful and benevolent men, believing that doctrine, can endure the sight of the present world and the history of the past. To behold successive, innumerable crowds carried on in the mighty impulse of a depraved nature, which they are impotent to reverse, and to which it is not the will of God, in his sovereignty, to apply the only adequate power, the withholding of which consigns them inevitably to their doom; to see them passing through a short term of moral existence (absurdly sometimes denominated a probation) under all the world's pernicious influences, with the addition of the malign and deadly one of the great tempter and destroyer, to confirm and augment the inherent depravity, on their speedy passage to everlasting woe;—I repeat, I am, without pretending to any extraordinary depth of feeling, amazed to conceive what they contrive to do with their sensibility, and in what manner they maintain a firm assurance of the divine goodness and justice.”
The following is the experience of the author of the Conflict of Ages:
Dr. Edward Beecher.
“If any one would know the full worth of the privilege of living under, worshiping, loving and adoring a God of honor, righteousness and love, let him, after years of joyful Christian experience and soul-satisfying communion with God, at last come to a point where his lovely character, for a time, vanishes from his eyes, and nothing can be rationally seen but a God selfish, dishonorable, unfeeling. No such person can ever believe that God issuch; but he may be so situated as to be unable rationally to see him in any other light. All the common modes of defending the doctrine of native depravity may have been examined and pronounced insufficient, and the question may urgently press itself upon the mind, Is not the present system a malevolent one? and of it no defense may appear.