But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace of God:" he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy
per se
. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual.
The next section is, taken together, one of the many instances that confirm my opinion that Calvinism (Archbishop Leighton's for example), compared with Taylor's Arminianism, is as the lamb in the wolf's skin to the wolf in the lamb's skin: the one is cruel in the phrases, the other in the doctrine.
Ib.
s. lvi. p. 469.
But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c.
Would not Taylor's purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume.
Ib.
lxiv. p. 478.