honour of his name was concerned, have more lightly, though not more conspicuously, afflicted a particular sovereign and his subjects. These truths it is well and wise to bear in our constant recollection while we are reading of those dispensations which are emphatically called "the wars of the Lord" in the Old Testament ;* both as evincing a close and constant analogy between the usual and natural operations of the Deity in the world, and those rarer instances in which His interference has been immediate and visible, and as proving that the objections which are often inconsiderately advanced against these last must, if well founded, extend further than their authors desire; must detract from the general no less than from the particular Providence of God, and lay the axe to the root of natural as well as of revealed religion.

But it is not the amount of the calamities inflicted on Pharaoh and his subjects; it is not the obstinacy of Pharaoh under them; it is not the fact that these sufferings were inflicted by God as punishments of long-continued oppression, and in order to the deliverance of three millions of enslaved and overburthened peasantry, and the establishment of a nation who were to preserve His name and His prophecies, through a thousand years of darkness, to the birth of Him in whom all nations were to receive light; they are not these circumstances which are so much calculated to excite our astonishment and our unbelieving murmurs,

*Num. xxi. 14.

as the fact that the obduracy which called down these chastisements was itself the work of the Most High.

By God Himself it had been declared to Moses beforehand, "I will harden Pharoah's heart, that he shall not let the people go."* Of God Himself it is expressly and repeatedly asserted by His prophet, "And the Lord hardened Pharoah's heart and the hearts of his servants." And in the words of the text we find the yet more explicit and, if possible, the yet more perplexing declaration that Pharaoh was absolutely raised up and placed, or continued, in his appropriate situation as a proper subject on whom, and at whose expense, the power of God might be displayed in the severest inflictions of His displeasure. "In very deed for this cause have I raised thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth."

This is a hard saying, unquestionably, and one which, as it has been generally understood, appears impossible to be reconciled with our natural and instinctive ideas of the justice and goodness of the Most High, no less than with many other and equally forcible passages of Scripture in which His dealings with mankind are spoken of and vindicated. To cause a man to sin, and then to punish him for sinning; to send warnings which are not even designed to produce an effect on him who receives them, and to create any sentient being for

* Exod. iv. 21.

no other purpose than to be guilty and miserable; this were a conduct which, as it would be horribly wicked in a finite intelligence, so it cannot without blasphemy be ascribed for a moment to the All-just, the All-wise, the All-merciful Father of nature!

Nor will the answer suffice which is sometimes rendered, in the words of St. Paul when speaking on a very different subject, namely, that we are all in the power of God as clay in the hands of the potter ; that He may frame "one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour ;"* and that while some of His creatures may be originally set apart by His will for honour and happiness, there may be others destined by the same free pleasure to set forth His power and terror.

For, in the first place, this argument, understand it as we please, will not apply to the difficulty under discussion, since the question is not of possibility or abstract right, but of probability, of analogy, of conformity to other declarations of God himself. We do not ask whether God has the power, but whether He has the will to pursue the line of conduct imputed to him; and if that conduct appears to us unjust or unmerciful, we are naturally led to conclude that, though God may do any thing which pleases Him, He will not please to do that which is repugnant to those attributes of His nature under which we know Him best, and by which He has most clearly revealed himself to our adoration and our affection.

*Rom. ix. 21.

Nor do we gain any thing toward the removal of our difficulties by an addition of that system which Augustin brought into the Christian Church, and which, with some qualifying clauses calculated to soften its apparent rigour, is, to this day, the distinctive and favourite doctrine of no inconsiderable multitude of believers. It is no justification, it is no extenuation of a particular act of apparent injustice and cruelty, to say that it is one part of a vast scheme abounding in similar actions; that the Father of mercy (Great God! that man should thus presume to speak of Thee!) is not cruel to Pharaoh alone, but to the great majority of His creatures. Of the supporters of the system of Calvin, God forbid that I should speak otherwise than with respect and affection, as of our brethren and fellow-labourers in the Lord, and as of those who, with one single error, hold the truth in a sincerity which no man can impeach, and in a godly diligence which may make too many of our party shed tears for our comparative supineness. Of the system itself I should desire to express myself with that caution which is due to the names of Augustin, of Calvin, and of Beza, of Jansenius, and of Pascal. But let God be true, even if every man be accounted a liar!* It is impossible that a system which, in its apparent consequences, destroys the principles of moral agency in man, and arraigns the truth and justice of Him from whom all truth and justice flow, it is impossible that a system of this kind can be from

*Romans iii. 4.

God, or can be well-pleasing to Him. The metaphysical difficulties, and they are many and grave, which perplex the Arminian hypothesis, may be inscrutable to our present faculties, or may be permitted to try our faith through the whole course of this mortal pilgrimage. But though we should be unable to reconcile them with the power and wisdom of God, it is evident that they leave His mercy and His truth unimpaired; and they are these last which of all God's attributes are the most important to His fallen creatures, inasmuch as they are these last, and these last alone, which give us hope of sanctification in this world, and of happiness in the world which is to succeed it!

But I have said that, in that passage of St. Paul which is urged as a solution of the history of Pharaoh, the apostle is treating of a very different subject. A reference indeed to the tenth chapter of Romans may convince us, as I conceive, that it is not the election of one individual and the reprobation of another to eternal life or to eternal misery, but the appointment of different nations to different parts in the general scheme of God's providence, which is the scope and purport of his argument; that not Jacob and Esau, but Israel and Edom, not Cornelius and Caiaphas, but the Gentile and the Jew, not the final sentence of individuals in the life to come, but the admission or rejection of large bodies of men from certain blessings and privileges in the world which now is, which only is the topic under discussion. And it becomes us, therefore, to