"Think the Lord has decreed Mary for the nunnery, reverend and learned sir?" said Murty, affecting great politeness.
"Not exactly, Murty; but the Lord, by his inscrutable decree before the creation, has passed sentence on all accountable beings: some he has delivered over to irremediable wrath, and others he has predestined to glory and bliss eternal; and no efforts of men can reverse these irrevocable decrees."
"O, dreadful!" said Murty. "I always heard that God willed all men to be saved; that it was in every man's power to avoid evil, and do good; that the giving of the commandments supposed the perfect liberty of men; and that, supposing the grace of God, all men had the means of salvation within their reach. If your system were true, all efforts of man to save himself would be useless, and all your pulpits and sermons would be worse than useless; for they would be a gross imposition, and a loss of time."
"There is where you are in error, Murty," said the parson. "Churches, pulpits, Bibles, and ministers are the machinery the Lord makes use of to secure the perseverance of the elect."
"That talk appears to me silly," rejoined Murty. "The elect are to be saved, or they are not; if they are to be saved by the decree of God, then there is no use of you and your machinery; if they can lose their 'election,' and become reprobate, then your theory is contradictory, absurd, and grossly perversive of the gospel. Take your choice of the horns of the dilemma."
The parson here entered into a very unintelligible explanation of a subject which constitutes, in defiance of common sense and of the plainest teaching of the gospel, the leading dogma of Presbyterianism; namely, foreordination, or the eternal decree of every man's election or reprobation, irrespective of free will, good works, or even the all-saving merits of our Lord Jesus Christ.
"How contradictory the tenets of sectarianism!" said Murty. "You, that accuse Catholicity of teaching absurd and incredible doctrines, are yourselves enslaved by the most incredible and contradictory creeds. It is the same in every sect. Take the Methodists, and they are the very contrary of what their name signifies. Instead of following any method in their mad orgies, they would seem to be, intellectually, the successors of the ancient bacchanalians. They would carry man back to his primitive woods, and, by the medium of plenty of 'straw,' would annihilate the distinctions between the sexes, by introducing a promiscuous intercourse, and legalizing, by custom, the most indecent practices."
"You have been at a camp meeting then, I see," said the parson, glad that attention was turned from his own sect to one that was a rival of it.
"Yes, sir, I have, I regret to be obliged to confess," said Murty; "and I must say that the Methodists, by their conduct there, showed themselves more ingenious in inventing the means of election than those of the church of Calvin."
"How so, Murty? In what do they exceed the Presbyterians?"