Again: "If an event be certainly foreknown, it must have a certain future existence, of which certain existence there must be some reason or ground. For as every free agent has the liberty of acting or not, or of performing a different action from the one which he eventually performs, if there existed no reason why the one took place and not the other, all knowledge of the action before it occurs is necessarily excluded. It would be to suppose knowledge without the least foundation for that knowledge in the object. God cannot know that something exists where there is nothing. God cannot see that an effect, yet future, will certainly be produced, if he does not know any cause of its existence." (Bib. Repertory, vol. iii. 1831.) If it be alleged that there is no other ground or reason of the future existence of the event necessary to be supposed, in order to infallible foreknowledge, than the free agency of the creature, it is the same as to say that it is infallibly known that a creature will choose or prefer one course of action before another, because he is at liberty to choose either; or, in other words, that he will certainly, in a given case, choose to act in a particular manner, because he is at perfect liberty to choose to act in the directly opposite manner, which is absurd. If there be such a thing as Arminian liberty, it is obvious, therefore, that there can be no such attribute of the Divine mind, as infallible and universal foreknowledge. If, on the other hand, we admit with the Scriptures the doctrine of Foreknowledge, it destroys for ever the baseless fabric of Arminian freedom. It is not surprising, therefore, that the doctrine of Foreknowledge should be in no very good odor with our Methodist brethren. This is inferrible, among other reasons, from the fact, that their Articles and Book of Discipline are entirely silent upon the subject; nor is it any where noticed in a volume of 240 pages, professing to be an exhibition of the faith of Christians. It is said, indeed, that the book mentions the Divine wisdom, which includes foreknowledge; but if men who "spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" make a distinction between these perfections of God, and give to each its separate place and prominence in their system, it would be both safe and modest not to attempt to improve upon their divinity. * Another most conclusive proof that Arminians are sorely perplexed with such subjects as Foreknowledge, freedom the will, &c. is found in their misstatements of the views of Calvinists. For example, Watson, one of their best informed writers, expounds the views of President Edwards as follows: "The notion inculcated is, that motives influence the will, just as an additional weight thrown into an even scale poises it and inclines the beam. This," he adds, "is the favorite metaphor of the necessitarians, * * representing the will to be as passive as the balance; or in other words, * * annihilating the distinction between mind and matter.' And in destroying this baseless fabric of his own raising, he speaks of "the mind being obliged to determine by the strongest motive, as the beam is to incline by the heaviest weight." But this is a gross caricature of Edwards' views. "All allow," says Edwards, "that natural (or physical) impossibility wholly excuses. As natural impossibility wholly excuses and excludes all blame, so the nearer the difficulty approaches to impossibility, the nearer the person is to blamelessness." These and similar statements stand on the page next to that where he uses the illustration of the scale or balance. He supposes it to be "intelligent," and employs it merely to explain by the metaphor of weights cast into the scale, how a greater or less degree of physical difficulty implies a greater or less degree of blamelessness! Thus, the doctrine of Edwards is plainly this: that if there were any such physical necessity or force exerted upon the will, as the weight upon the balance, man would be wholly * * * *Inst. vol. ii. p. 440. On the Will, part 3, sec. 3. without blame! Yet Watson has the hardihood to charge him with the monstrous notion that the will is governed by motives, just as the material scale is moved by weights! Was there ever a more gross and palpable misstatement? Following such a brilliant example, Messrs. Simpson and Foster use a similar illustration: "The water must run through the water-course; the wheel must turn under the force of the current. * * * The movements of the mind are as absolutely fixed and rigidly necessary as the movements of the material creation, * * * when Omnipotence urges it forward!"* This, Arminians say, is the Calvinistic and Edwardean doctrine of the influence of motives upon the will! Yet, as we have just shown, and as any person of common sense may read for himself, President Edwards argues at length to prove that such a doctrine entirely excuses the sinner from blame! And even Dr. Fisk takes up the same tale: "Dr. Edwards," he tells 66 us, compares our volitions to the vibrations of a scale beam. * * * What is this but teaching that motions of mind are governed by the same fixed laws as those of matter, and that volitions are perfectly mechanical states of mind." Thus they charge upon Edwards the very doctrine which he laboriously refutes; and then boast over it, as though they had achieved a great victory! But what are these wonderful and almost omnipotent things called motives, which, we are told, work the mind or will, as the Almighty Power moves the material creation? Watson says they are reasons of choice, views and conceptions of things in the in consideration of which the mind itself wills and determines." § But if this definition be correct and it is sufficiently so for all practical purposes-how is it possible the mind or will should be "worked mind, * * * Objections, &c. pp. 237, 238. † See the part and section before quoted. Institutes, vol. ii. p. 440. as a machine" by its own "reasons of choice, its views and conceptions of things?" For example, an impenitent person chooses a present wordly good in preference to future eternal happiness, which is distant and not so certainly in his power. His "views and conceptions" of the present good are such that, like the wine cup of the intemperate, they present to his mind stronger "reasons of choice" than the distant future presents. Of course he chooses the present good, and refuses the future happiness. But is there any thing in this mental operation bearing the most distant resemblance to the "vibratory movement of a balance" under the motive power of a weight? or any thing like the power of Omnipotence urging the will to act? How strange the misrepresentation! Arminians must be hard pressed in argument before they descend to such subterfuges. A similar series of misstatements is attached to the doctrine of "necessity," as held and taught by Calvinists, in its relations to Divine Foreknowledge. Thus we are told—“The connection between the volition and the strongest motive is as absolute and necessary as the connection between any cause (even the will of God,) and its effect." And we have large discourse about "the mind whose determinations are absolutely fixed by the force of motives"-"required to overcome Omnipotence itself," which is the cause of the necessity —“ a doctrine of necessity, which requires man to do what is absolutely impossible—what God himself cannot do, for He cannot work impossibilities."* And even Bishop Simpson, in his introduction to Foster's work, speaks of the "doctrine of necessity" as opposed to "the freedom of the human will, &c." But what says President Edwards in defining the term necessity? As used by himself and other Calvinists in these discussions, he expressly says he means "nothing different from certainty." And he adds: "I speak not now of the Foster's Objections, chap. 8, and in numerous other places. certainty of knowledge, but the certainty that is in things themselves, which is the foundation of the certainty of knowledge; or that (certainty) wherein lies the ground of the infallible truth of the proposition which affirms them." * But according to this definition, every prophecy of the Scriptures produces, or at least proves the infallible necessity (i. e. certainty,) of the event predicted? Such were the incarnation, sufferings and death of Christ, &c. All these events were infallibly necessary, or certain to take place, as Edwards and other Calvinists understand the term. Arminians themselves dare not question the truth of these state ments. But how do such authors as Watson, Fisk, Simpson and Foster dispose of such facts as these? Here, for example, is a formal definition given by Edwards at the opening of his immortal work on the Will, and observed cautiously throughout, whenever he has occasion to speak of necessity. How do these Arminians escape from such a predicament and manage to patch up their argument? Why, they say Edwards and other Calvinists must mean by necessity "a power not different from the law of gravitation or magnetic attraction" -"from the (Calvinistic) theory, inertia becomes the law of mind as of matter." "Fate runs through all." Such, they say, "is the supreme controlling power of Dr. Edwards and his followers." So that when Edwards demonstrates that the sufferings and death of Christ, and other great events predicted in the Scriptures, were necessary, or certain to take place, these Arminians say he meant they were predicted to take place under some such influence as the law of gravitation, some physical force or compulsion, which the Jews, who, "with wicked hands, crucified and slew the Lord of glory," could no more resist than they could resist the laws of the planetary worlds! Did human weakness ever concoct *On the Will, part 1, sec. 3. † Objections to Calvinism, p. 240, et alibi. |