Both parties rest their dogmas on the same metaphysical grounds. At the same time, as moral reasoners, the palm of superiority must be awarded to Socinians, who reject most consistently the doctrine of human corruption, and the atonement of Christ, together with the correspondent doctrines of the Gospel, as altogether out of place in a scheme which denies the freedom of human actions and reduces all independent agency to that of the Deity alone; while the Calvinist subjects the human race to an inevitable necessity of sinning, denies to them individually, even the semblance of a probationary course—makes them accountable, yet withholds the powers necessary to a moral agent, and then most unrighteously dooms to perdition all but the elect! In rejecting such a theory of religion, we reject not the fundamental doctrines of Christianity; we only vindicate them from objections, which, if unanswerable, are fatal; and we hold to the Gospel with a firmer conviction and a livelier faith, when we behold its accordance with the righteousness of the Divine administration and with the moral constitution of man.
On a subject, which has been so long and so laboriously investigated, and to the illustration of which the most vigorous and profound of human intellects have directed their energies, it would be vain to expect any novelty of argument. On either side, it may be presumed, the question has been exhausted, or, that the human mind has done all that its powers can accomplish, however unsatisfactory or inconclusive, in some respects, the result.
It appears to the writer of these pages, on a calm and summary review of the arguments by which the doctrines of freedom and necessity have been respectively supported, that those reasonings which are purely philosophical or metaphysical decidedly preponderate on the side of Necessity. The prescience of the Deity cannot, on any known principle, be reconciled with the contingency which attaches to the actions or determinations of man, on the hypothesis of freedom[2]. And, moreover, if every event requires a cause, and every volition is guided by motives, what are called the spontaneous acts of the mind must be the necessary result of motives which direct and command its elections. “To say that in our choice we reject the stronger motive, and that we choose a thing merely because we choose it, is sheer nonsense and absurdity. And whoever, with a sound understanding, will fix his mind upon the state of the question, will perceive its impossibility.”
But, all correct moral reasoning ranges on the side of freedom. In opposition to the subtle or forcible reasonings of the metaphysician, every individual can plead his inward consciousness of voluntary agency. He feels, he knows, that he is free. The exercise of the moral sense, the judgment which the mind pronounces on its own good or evil movements, the conviction of having done or neglected a duty, the calm satisfaction of the virtuous mind, and the fierce or sullen remorse of the criminal, are associated with the insuppressible persuasion of liberty. Destroy this persuasion, and virtue is despoiled of its loveliness, vice of its deformity. But it cannot be destroyed. It is the voice of nature. The Creator has so formed us, that we cannot throw off from ourselves the sense of responsibility, nor regard our fellow creatures as unfit for praise or blame, for love or hatred. Men treat each other as free agents in all the transactions of human life, and God administers the government of the world, on the principle that mankind are capable of self-control, regulating their conduct by the hope of reward or fear of punishment. If the consciousness of freedom be a delusion, it follows that moral obligation, duty, reward, guilt, punishment, are delusions, and that religion, however salutary in its effects, is nothing better than a magnificent imposture.
Calvinism is an attempt to found the religion of Christ on the doctrine of necessity, and to accommodate its truths, which suppose and require free agency in man, to a dark and appalling fatalism. But in a case like the present, in which metaphysical reasonings, however profound or conclusive, so far as they go, are at variance with practical truth, with consciousness, with the actual state of things, and with the unquestionable procedures of the Divine government, as confirmed by the scriptures, wisdom would seem to dictate our adhesion to that side of the question, which is supported by moral arguments.
In taking this part, it does not follow that we are to repudiate, as totally without foundation, the philosophy and the metaphysics of the necessarian—æquo pretio æstimentur. We may admit, that the force of his argument, in the present imperfect state of human knowledge, renders the question perplexed and difficult; that it accounts for the divided opinions of the erudite and the devout, and that it precludes the hope of a speedy termination of the controversy. But in assigning to moral reasoning the superior authority, we are governed by a just regard to the nature of the question at issue, which, being related to the destinies of moral agents, and the principles on which the Deity conducts his moral government, must be determined, not by metaphysical, but by moral arguments. When brought to this test, Calvinism appears utterly indefensible, as being a system at variance with the attributes of the Deity, and irreconcileable with the moral constitution of human beings, and with the obligations laid upon them by their Creator. It is falsified by facts.
That the predestinarian theology, which denies the freedom of the will, is supported by names of great consideration, is cheerfully granted. No man, for example, was ever endowed with a genius more commanding, with logical powers more acute, with a faculty more surprising of writing on recondite subjects with force, perspicuity, and nervous eloquence, than President Edwards. Nevertheless, the correctness of his views is not implicitly to be inferred from his transcendant intellect and fervent piety.
All the great errors, which have been propagated in the Christian Church, have found advocates in men of the first character for intellectual power and moral dignity, or they would have passed away with their authors into immediate oblivion.
In estimating the authority of Edwards as a theologian, it is requisite that we should know the temperament and habits of that very remarkable person. It is not, perhaps, generally considered, that great as were the energy and acuteness of his reasoning powers, he was less under the dominion of these than of his imagination and feelings. In early life this is not unfrequently the case with persons of imaginative character; but, commonly, the ardent enthusiasm of youth gives way afterwards to the ascendancy of the higher faculties. Edwards was, constitutionally, too much the creature of dreams and impulses ever to escape from their control. His gigantic mind was held in perpetual bondage. His natural temperament was fostered throughout the whole period which moulds and fixes the character, by his holding little converse with human beings beyond the sphere of a particular religious community in an obscure American town, and by an almost uninterrupted contemplation of nature in her gloomy and awful forms, amid the silence of uncultivated plains, and the solitude of interminable forests. The profound feeling, the intense excitement, which accompanied his early devotional exercises, were such as to insure a permanent attachment to every principle and every impression of that susceptible age. The visions of a warm, and often morbid, imagination continued to be cherished with religious confidence and love for ever afterwards. Every doubt, of what he once had received for truth, was anxiously suppressed in the manhood of his mind as an infernal suggestion; and the acuteness of his reasoning powers, by supplying him at all times with an argument, for what he conceived it his duty to believe, served, not to emancipate him from false apprehensions of truth, but to rivet upon him more firmly the chains of ignorance or error. When argument was doubtful, a dogged fanaticism supplied its place. This may be illustrated by a particular instance, and bearing directly on the subject of our present discussion.
It cannot be doubted, by any person qualified to appreciate his writings, that his views of the Divine sovereignty are resolvable into a system of absolute fatalism, so far as the actions and destinies of men are concerned. Reason and conscience revolt from the consequences involved in such a system; all our moral instincts condemn it. But it was instilled into his mind by Calvinistic instructors in the days of his boyhood; his imagination was perpetually haunted by it; and having identified it with the truth of divine revelation, which he held in religious veneration and awe, he finally vanquished every doubt respecting it, not by the deliberate exercise of his judgment, on a calm investigation of evidence, but by the force of his religious feelings, and of his ascendant imagination. Let him tell his own story.