Luther: “When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not

square with her rules, we must say; ‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’ ”

Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be

distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy;

see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July,

1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite

space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain,

mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar

Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The

Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being

immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its

nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in

other words is essentially three in its constitution, its

constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and

the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and

is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the

tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that “God is light, and in him

is no darkness at all”_ (1 John 1:5)_. The actinic rays are in

themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are

they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.

Joseph Cook: “Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father,

Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when

unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is

unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit,

figured by heat, is Christ’s continued life.” Ruder illustrations

are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the

candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one

wood, in the tree. In Geer’s illustration, mentioned above, from

the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is

not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we

cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far

as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot

conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.

(_b_) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the

psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held

by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis

(Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object

(Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).

Augustine: “Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc

cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I

will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing

and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three

functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one

mind, one essence.... “Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore

aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor.

Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel

copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.” Calvin speaks

of Augustine’s view as “a speculation far from solid.” But

Augustine himself had said: “If asked to define the Trinity, we

can only say that it is not this or that.” John of Damascus: “All

we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.” By

this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that

the precise _mode_ of God’s triune existence is unrevealed and

inscrutable.

Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the

same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the

sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the

Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference,

of this otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.” Hegel calls

God “the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the

Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in

an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less

distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy,

321, 331. Hegel’s general doctrine is that the highest unity is to

be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation

of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing;

we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis,

Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief

is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both. _Zweifel_

comes from _Zwei_, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon “ein

Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.” Ladd, Introd.

to Philosophy, 202, speaks of “the monotonous tit-tat-too of the

Hegelian logic.” Ruskin speaks of it as “pure, definite, and

highly finished nonsense.” On the Hegelian principle good and evil

cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be

no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian

Philosophy “The Secret of Hegel,” and his readers have often

remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it

known.

Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand

all his poetry. “Ah, well,” replied the poet, “if a reader of your

calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be

content.” When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married

Miss Barrett, he said: “It is a good thing that these two

understand each other, for no one else understands them.” A pupil

once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter’s writings and asked

for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied:

“When that passage was written, there were two who knew its

meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is

God.” Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon

the religious life of Berlin, says: “I could accommodate myself to

the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all

superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which

was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without

turtle.” When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take

up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair

and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence

and go away. Hegel’s doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is

translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.

The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject,

object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of

Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N.

Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in

Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and

Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174,

has a similar analogy: 1. A man’s invisible self; 2. the visible

expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of

this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held

to be even better, because no man’s personality is complete in

itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect

unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church

the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a

mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational

dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the

reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen’s

characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we

would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete

exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact,

different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole,

it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in

its processes and powers, points towards something higher than

itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute

that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love,

worship and service.

No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no

one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such

illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish

no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless

carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.

2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.

This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same

numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We

assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is

three with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with

respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be

denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the

measure of the divine.

The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing

differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in

the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many

faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent

man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until

intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative

independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between

them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine

that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so

that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are

united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible

essence.

Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God

who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not

say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three

persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is

one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to

the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the

persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man’s nature furnishes

any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not

distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might

furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of

the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the

figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this

agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul’s

conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan.

1887.

_Ps. 86:11—_“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a

complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to

sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to

order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a

long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she

“unanimously consented.” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with

all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,

and with all thy mind”_ (Luke 10:27)._ Man must not lead a dual

life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The

good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden: “Theoretically,

symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old

Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate

‘temperance’ or ‘self-control’ is better expressed by

‘whole-mindedness.’ ”

Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of

divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity.

Man’s personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a

subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and

unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own

personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity,

which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for

completion, as for example in the family.... But God’s personality

has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the

most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts

of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful

mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two

cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence

of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference

of form and function, each separate part having an individuality

and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but

complex.” Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons

are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible

that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against

the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite

personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human

society.”

The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one

and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than

one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the

possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God.

Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism,

if it attained the highest level of psychical perfection, might be

endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling

it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of

families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral

personality which implies responsibility and accountability. “The

_Zeitgeist_,” he says, “is the product of a kind of collective

psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the

individual minds of a generation.” We do not maintain that any one

of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains

personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain

that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible

than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no

necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the

one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H.

Hutton: “A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be

expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations

in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our

humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the

simplicity of absolute unity.”

3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.

A. It is essential to any proper theism.

Neither God’s independence nor God’s blessedness can be maintained upon

grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes

creation indispensable to God’s perfection, tends to a belief in the

eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in

modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism. “Love is an impossible

exercise to a solitary being.” Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living

Unity in the Godhead.

Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to

find a _perfect objective_, congruous and fitting, for a perfect

intelligence, and the answer is: ‘_a perfect intelligence_.’ ” The

author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian

philosopher, as follows: “There is only one resource left for

completing the needful Objectivity for God, _viz._, to admit in

some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or

medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof

[of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with the

_divine cause_, and the _material condition_ of all nature, in

eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and

rudimentary object.” See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying

that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak

only of self-existent _causes_. A self-existence which is _not_ a

cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a

self-existence which _is_ a cause; nay, is even required for the

exercise of its causality.” Here we see that Martineau’s

Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God’s

blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal

universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford

fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily

bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not

himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free.

The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God’s

self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words,

exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.

E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham’s

Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago

James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald: ‘Neither my

intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with

the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites,

Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with

their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy,

on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’ In his paper

entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says

that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships

the Son: ‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the

other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the

pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval

essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’ ” Dr. Johnson adds:

“So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and

professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance

of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so

profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship

the Son, because all that we know of God was revealed by act of

the Son.” After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau

withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united

with any Trinitarian church.

H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of

Martineau’s most significant utterances, such as the following:

“The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in

the appeal it makes to the inward ‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight

whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness

of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow

of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the

most terrible of all mistakes, _viz._, _to get rid_ of the burden,

by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For

myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture

and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the

product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns

of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law

and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely

feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than

ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive

article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of

belief by asserting that “both Trinitarians and Unitarians are

coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine.

The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they

declared Christ _homoousios_ with the Father. We assert the same

of mankind.” But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture.

Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before

Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness

of the Godhead bodily (_John 8:57_; _Col. 2:9_).

Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency

by this “facilis descensus Averno,” this lapse from theism into

pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing

degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker,

and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern

Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the

later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is

felt to be insufficient to the mind’s conception of Absolute

Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God.

“We take refuge in the term ‘Godhead.’ The literati find relief in

speaking of ‘the gods.’ ” Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac.,

3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though

disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the

Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of

the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.” Twesten,

quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God.

Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness

which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness

ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself

and independently of the finite.” Shedd himself remarks: “The

attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of

divine _Unity_ is a failure, because it fails to construct the

doctrine of the divine _Personality_. It contends by implication

that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without

an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject

contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the

identity of both.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless

unit.” Bp. Phillips Brooks: “Unitarianism has got the notion of

God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is

dying of its meagre Deity.” Unitarianism is not the doctrine of

one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the

unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either

an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the

Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that

“Nature and God are the same.” It is the old worship of Baal and

Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For “Nature”

includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man

discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the

manifestations of God.

Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus

Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the

great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire

universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.” Even

James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors,

436, admits that “there is an essential truth hidden in the idea

of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it

has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human

heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.” William

Adams Brown: “If God is by nature love, he must be by nature

social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the

limitations of finite personality are removed.” But Dr. Brown

wrongly adds: “Not the mysteries of God’s being, as he is in

himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this

doctrine.” Similarly P. S. Moxom: “I do not know how it is

possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is

absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived

of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as

righteous.” But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other

moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that

righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons

within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,

1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre,

1:462-524.

W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer

of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without

attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be

non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an

antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, or _natura

naturans_ and _natura naturata_, or in some other way. This

antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think

of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in

existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we

cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune

God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God

revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and

God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the

Spirit that proceeds from both.” This confession of an economic

Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent

and eternal.

B. It is essential to any proper revelation.

If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or

reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final

revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each

of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too

with the Holy Spirit. “As God can be revealed only through God, so also

can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God,

then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a

reality.” In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back

to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is

ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,

156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and

his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer

the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see

the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father,

pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the

Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either

the Son or the Spirit. See _Rom. 8:27—_“he that searcheth the

hearts [_i. e._, God] knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,

because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the

will of God.” See also Godet on _John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God

at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the

Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ

ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I: “Christianity says with simplicity,

‘No man hath seen God, except God.’ ” _John 16:15—_“All things

whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he

taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims

for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the

Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this,

even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to

take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, on _John

14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou,

Show us the Father?”

The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be

no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation

in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce,

in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an

infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual

minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake.

Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if

Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God’s

will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as

only “one of the day’s works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in

the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand

regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom

we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all

truth and the judge of all mankind. “Heaven and earth shall pass

away, but my words shall not pass away”_ (Mat. 24:35)._ The

resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (_John 5:28_),

and future retribution shall be “the wrath of the Lamb”_ (Rev.

6:16)_. Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except

through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts

only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of

the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

C. It is essential to any proper redemption.

If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or

atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is

infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only

one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can

purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality,

may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our

Sanctifier.

“God is the way to himself.” “Nothing human holds good before God,

and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.” The best method of

arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin;

for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that

only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a

slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of

the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It

would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when

logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has

also always led to Unitarianism.” In the reverse order, too, it is

manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render

more superficial men’s views of the sin and guilt and punishment

from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden

religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and

missionary effort (_John 12:44_; _Heb. 10:26_). See Arthur, on the

Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in

Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol.

Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to

see God in the light of nature, while he said: ‘In thy light shall

we see light’_ (Ps. 36:9)_.” We should see nature in the light of

Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God

in Christ (_John 16:9_). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God;

to reject Christ is to turn one’s back on God: _John 12:44—_“He

that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent

me”; _Heb. 10:26, 29—_“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin

... [for him] who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”

In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure

pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct

to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch

housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through

him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King,

whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we

come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is

himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a

convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer’s wife and

pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the

murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a

pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the

murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have

heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken,

blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at

Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen’s dress; but I have

also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees,

and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put

him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we

may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can

ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it

will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he

whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God

before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”

Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had

strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the

doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his

Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says: “I

regard Smith’s conversion as the most remarkable event in College

in my day.” Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his

own heart; and doubts about Christ’s divinity could not hold their

own against the confession: “Of one thing I feel assured: I need

an infinite Savior.” Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian

doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and

brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of

God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul: “None but an

infinite Savior can ever save me!” Only in a divine Christ—Christ

_for_ us upon the Cross, and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit—can the

convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true

religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B.

Smith wrote in his later life: “When the doctrine of the Trinity

was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement

and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical

necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems,

the gems all fall asunder.”

D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.

If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in

God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no

longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary

purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God,

then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these

respects as the highest dignity of our being.

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God’s

absolute and essential nature; not simply what he is _to us_, but

what he is _in himself_. If Christ is the eternal Son of the

Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature,

the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being;

the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates

from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian

idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God,

reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and

thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father

is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the

universe.” Hence _1 John 2:23—_“Whosoever denieth the Son, the

same hath not the Father.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If

God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as

waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished

before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself.

His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to

his relation to some of his creatures. The words ‘God is love’_ (1

John 4:8)_ become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the

expression of a truth about the divine nature.”

Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a

perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing

in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual

want. It is a Father’s perfection to originate—a Son’s to receive.

We need sympathy and aid in this _receptive_ life; hence, the help

of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are

heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ’s filial life to the root of all

filial life in us. See _Gal. 2:19, 20—_‘it is no longer I that

live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in

the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God,

who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’” Thomas Erskine of

Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in

this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.” Gore,

Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of

manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the

prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is

love.” On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the

Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M.

Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On

the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289;

Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed

Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.

On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod.

Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,

‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one;

the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these

three made all things.’ ” The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris,

Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true

persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the

Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was

pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29;

Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of

the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three

dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man

creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?

The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given

the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a

personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in

good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the

three mystic letters of the syllable _Om_, or _Aum_, and by the

image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick,

Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The places of the three are

interchangeable. Williams: “In the three persons the one God is

shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva,

Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the

blessed three.” There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men’s

salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which

temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced

to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is

only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity.

According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in

later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first

principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of

matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the

mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light

of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.

The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo

or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus. “These three

surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential

care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing

relations to each other, that they may be said to ‘agree in

one’ ”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone,

Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it

gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is

a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a

philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.

Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are “residuary

fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a

process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and

spiritual degradation.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,

92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated

by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only

names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity

invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a

latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the

objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is

never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The

personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is

scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering

breeze or sullen moaning restless sea. ‘There is but one,’ they

say, ‘though the poets call him by different names.’ The

all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of

these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was

implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in

Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of

philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find

in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying

essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal

substance, and he wished to look at all things ‘under the form of

eternity.’ All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the

infinite substance which we call God.” See also L. L. Paine,

Ethnic Trinities.

The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God,

together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of

it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the

Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the

inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our

treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor: “He who goes about to

speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and

names of man’s invention, talking of essence and existences,

hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in

pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head,

and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that

feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom,

sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the

Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand

nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands

the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

Chapter III. The Decrees Of God.

I. Definition of Decrees.

By the decrees of God we mean that eternal plan by which God has rendered

certain all the events of the universe, past, present, and future. Notice

in explanation that:

(_a_) The decrees are many only to our finite comprehension; in their own

nature they are but one plan, which embraces not only effects but also

causes, not only the ends to be secured but also the means needful to

secure them.

In _Rom. 8:28—_“called according to his purpose”—the many decrees

for the salvation of many individuals are represented as forming

but one purpose of God. _Eph. 1:11—_“foreordained according to the

purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his

will”—notice again the word “_purpose_,” in the singular. _Eph.

3:11—_“according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in

Christ Jesus our Lord.” This one purpose or plan of God includes

both means and ends, prayer and its answer, labor and its fruit.

Tyrolese proverb: “God has his plan for every man.” Every man, as

well as Jean Paul, is “der Einzige”—the unique. There is a single

plan which embraces all things; “we use the word ‘decree’ when we

think of it partitively” (Pepper). See Hodge, Outlines of

Theology, 1st ed., 165; 2d ed., 200—“In fact, no event is

isolated—to determine one involves determination of the whole

concatenation of causes and effects which constitutes the

universe.” The word “plan” is preferable to the word “decrees,”

because “plan” excludes the ideas of (1) plurality, (2)

short-sightedness, (3) arbitrariness, (4) compulsion.

(_b_) The decrees, as the eternal act of an infinitely perfect will,

though they have logical relations to each other, have no chronological

relation. They are not therefore the result of deliberation, in any sense

that implies short-sightedness or hesitancy.

Logically, in God’s decree the sun precedes the sunlight, and the

decree to bring into being a father precedes the decree that there

shall be a son. God decrees man before he decrees man’s act; he

decrees the creation of man before he decrees man’s existence. But

there is no chronological succession. “_Counsel_” in _Eph.

1:11—_“the counsel of his will”—means, not deliberation, but

wisdom.

(_c_) Since the will in which the decrees have their origin is a free

will, the decrees are not a merely instinctive or necessary exercise of

the divine intelligence or volition, such as pantheism supposes.

It belongs to the perfection of God that he have a plan, and the

best possible plan. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty

that infinite wisdom will act wisely. God’s decrees are not God;

they are not identical with his essence; they do not flow from his

being in the same necessary way in which the eternal Son proceeds

from the eternal Father. There is free will in God, which acts

with infinite certainty, yet without necessity. To call even the

decree of salvation necessary is to deny grace, and to make an

unfree God. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:355; lect. 34.

(_d_) The decrees have reference to things outside of God. God does not

decree to be holy, nor to exist as three persons in one essence.

Decrees are the preparation for external events—the embracing of

certain things and acts in a plan. They do not include those

processes and operations within the Godhead which have no

reference to the universe.

(_e_) The decrees primarily respect the acts of God himself, in Creation,

Providence, and Grace; secondarily, the acts of free creatures, which he

foresees will result therefrom.

While we deny the assertion of Whedon, that “the divine plan

embraces _only_ divine actions,” we grant that God’s plan has

reference _primarily_ to his own actions, and that the sinful acts

of men, in particular, are the objects, not of a decree that God

will efficiently produce them, but of a decree that God will

permit men, in the exercise of their own free will, to produce

them.

(_f_) The decree to act is not the act. The decrees are an internal

exercise and manifestation of the divine attributes, and are not to be

confounded with Creation, Providence, and Redemption, which are the

execution of the decrees.

The decrees are the first operation of the attributes, and the

first manifestation of personality of which we have any knowledge

within the Godhead. They presuppose those essential acts or

movements within the divine nature which we call generation and

procession. They involve by way of consequence that execution of

the decrees which we call Creation, Providence, and Redemption,

but they are not to be confounded with either of these.

(_g_) The decrees are therefore not addressed to creatures; are not of the

nature of statute law; and lay neither compulsion nor obligation upon the

wills of men.

So ordering the universe that men _will_ pursue a given course of action

is a very different thing from declaring, ordering, or commanding that

they _shall_. “Our acts are in accordance with the decrees, but not

_necessarily_ so—we _can_ do otherwise and often _should_” (Park). The

Frenchman who fell into the water and cried: “I will, drown,—no one shall

help me!” was very naturally permitted to drown; if he had said: “I shall

drown,—no one will help me!” he might perchance have called some friendly

person to his aid.

(_h_) All human acts, whether evil or good, enter into the divine plan and

so are objects of God’s decrees, although God’s actual agency with regard

to the evil is only a permissive agency.

No decree of God reads: “You shall sin.” For (1) no decree is

addressed to _you_; (2) no decree with respect to you says

_shall_; (3) God cannot cause _sin_, or decree to cause it. He

simply decrees to create, and himself to act, in such a way that

you will, of your own free choice, commit sin. God determines upon

his own acts, foreseeing what the results will be in the free acts

of his creatures, and so he determines those results. This

permissive decree is the only decree of God with respect to sin.

Man of himself is capable of producing sin. Of himself he is not

capable of producing holiness. In the production of holiness two

powers must concur, God’s will and man’s will, and God’s will must

act first. The decree of good, therefore, is not simply a

permissive decree, as in the case of evil. God’s decree, in the

former case, is a decree to bring to bear positive agencies for

its production, such as circumstances, motives, influences of his

Spirit. But, in the case of evil, God’s decrees are simply his

arrangement that man may do as he pleases, God all the while

foreseeing the result.

Permissive agency should not be confounded with conditional

agency, nor permissive decree with conditional decree. God

foreordained sin only indirectly. The machine is constructed not

for the sake of the friction, but in spite of it. In the parable

_Mat. 13:24-30_, the question “_Whence then hath it tares?_” is

answered, not by saying, “I decreed the tares.” but by saying:

“_An enemy hath done this_.” Yet we must take exception to

Principal Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Theology, 456, when he

says: “God did not _permit_ sin to be; it is, in its essence, the

transgression of his law, and so his only attitude toward it is

one of opposition. It _is_, because man has contradicted and

resisted his will.” Here the truth of God’s opposition to sin is

stated so sharply as almost to deny the decree of sin in any

sense. We maintain that God does decree sin in the sense of

embracing in his plan the foreseen transgressions of men, while at

the same time we maintain that these foreseen transgressions are

chargeable wholly to men and not at all to God.

(_i_) While God’s total plan with regard to creatures is called

predestination, or foreordination, his purpose so to act that certain will

believe and be saved is called election, and his purpose so to act that

certain will refuse to believe and be lost is called reprobation. We

discuss election and reprobation, in a later chapter, as a part of the

Application of Redemption.

God’s decrees may be divided into decrees with respect to nature,

and decrees with respect to moral beings. These last we call

foreordination, or predestination; and of these decrees with

respect to moral beings there are two kinds, the decree of

election, and the decree of reprobation; see our treatment of the

doctrine of Election. George Herbert: “We all acknowledge both thy

power and love To be exact, transcendent, and divine; Who dost so

strongly and so sweetly move. While all things have their will—yet

none but thine. For either thy _command_ or thy _permission_ Lays

hands on all; they are thy right and left. The first puts on with

speed and expedition; The other curbs sin’s stealing pace and

theft. Nothing escapes them both; all must appear And be disposed

and dressed and tuned by thee Who sweetly temperest all. If we

could hear Thy skill and art, what music it would be!” On the

whole doctrine, see Shedd, Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:1-25.

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Decrees.

1. From Scripture.

A. The Scriptures declare that all things are included in the divine

decrees. B. They declare that special things and events are decreed; as,

for example, (_a_) the stability of the physical universe; (_b_) the

outward circumstances of nations; (_c_) the length of human life; (_d_)

the mode of our death; (_e_) the free acts of men, both good acts and evil

acts. C. They declare that God has decreed (_a_) the salvation of

believers; (_b_) the establishment of Christ’s kingdom; (_c_) the work of

Christ and of his people in establishing it.

A. _Is. 14:26, 27—_“This is the purpose that is purposed upon the

whole earth; and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all

the nations; for Jehovah of hosts hath purposed ... and his hand

is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?” _46:10,

11—_“declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times

the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand,

and I will do all my pleasure ... yea, I have spoken, I will also

bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it.” _Dan.

4:35—_“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and

among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or

say unto him, What doest thou?” _Eph. 1:11—_“the purpose of him

who worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”

B. (_a_) _Ps. 119:89-91—_“For ever, O Jehovah, thy word is settled

in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: Thou hast

established the earth and it abideth. They abide this day

according to thine ordinances; For all things are thy servants.”

(_b_) _Acts 17:26—_“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on

all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed

seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; _cf._ _Zach.

5:1—_“came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the

mountains were mountains of brass”—the fixed decrees from which

proceed God’s providential dealings? (_c_) _Job 14:5—_“Seeing his

days are determined, The number of his months is with thee, And

thou hast determined his bounds that he cannot pass.” (_d_) _John

21:19—_“this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he

should glorify God.” (_e_) Good acts: _Is. 44:28—_“that saith of

Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even

saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy

foundation shall be laid”; _Eph. 2:10—_“For we are his

workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God

afore prepared that we should walk in them.” Evil acts: _Gen.

50:20—_“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for

good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people

alive”; _1 K. 12:15—_“So the king hearkened not unto the people,

for it was a thing brought about of Jehovah”; _24—_“for this thing

is of me”; _Luke 22:23—_“For the Son of man indeed goeth, as it

hath been determined: but woe unto that man through whom he is

betrayed”; _Acts 2:23—_“him, being delivered up by the determinate

counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men

did crucify and slay”; _4:27, 28—_“of a truth in this city against

thy holy Servant Jesus, who thou didst anoint, both Herod and

Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were

gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel

foreordained to come to pass”; _Rom. 9:17—_“For the scripture

saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up,

that I might show in thee my power”; _1 Pet 2:3—_“They stumble at

the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed”;

_Rev. 17:17—_“For God did put in their hearts to do his mind, and

to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast,

until the words of God should be accomplished.”

C. (_a_) _1 Cor. 2:7—_“the wisdom which hath been hidden, which

God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”; _Eph 3:10,

11—_“manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose

which he purposed in Christ Jesus our lord.” _Ephesians 1_ is a

pæan in praise of God’s decrees. (_b_) The greatest decree of all

is the decree to give the world to Christ. _Ps. 2:7, 8—_“I will

tell of the decree:... I will give thee the nations for thine

inheritance”; _cf._ _verse 6—_“I have set my king Upon my holy

hill of Zion”; _1 Cor. 15:25—_“he must reign, till he hath put all

his enemies under his feet.” (_c_) This decree we are to convert

into our decree; God’s will is to be executed through our wills.

_Phil. 2:12, 13—_“work out your own salvation with fear and

trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to

work, for his good pleasure.” _Rev. 5:1, 7—_“I saw in the right

hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on

the back, close sealed with seven seals.... And he [the Lamb]

came, and he taketh it out of the right hand of him that sat on

the throne”; _verse 9—_“Worthy art thou to take the book, and to

open the seals thereof”—Christ alone has the omniscience to know,

and the omnipotence to execute, the divine decrees. When John

weeps because there is none in heaven or earth to loose the seals

and to read the book of God’s decrees, the Lion of the tribe of

Judah prevails to open it. Only Christ conducts the course of

history to its appointed end. See A. H. Strong, Christ in

Creation, 268-283, on The Decree of God as the Great Encouragement

to Missions.

2. From Reason.

A. From the Divine Foreknowledge.

Foreknowledge implies fixity, and fixity implies decree.—From eternity God

foresaw all the events of the universe as fixed and certain. This fixity

and certainty could not have had its ground either in blind fate or in the

variable wills of men, since neither of these had an existence. It could

have had its ground in nothing outside the divine mind, for in eternity

nothing existed besides the divine mind. But for this fixity there must

have been a cause; if anything in the future was fixed, something must

have fixed it. This fixity could have had its ground only in the plan and

purpose of God. In fine, if God foresaw the future as certain, it must

have been because there was something in himself which made it certain;

or, in other words, because he had decreed it.

We object therefore to the statement of E. G. Robinson, Christian

Theology, 74—“God’s knowledge and God’s purposes both being

eternal, one cannot be conceived as the ground of the other, nor

can either be predicated to the exclusion of the other as the

cause of things, but, correlative and eternal, they must be

coequal quantities in thought.” We reply that while decree does

not chronologically precede, it does logically precede,

foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is not of possible events, but of

what is certain to be. The certainty of future events which God

foreknew could have had its ground only in his decree, since he

alone existed to be the ground and explanation of this certainty.

Events were fixed only because God had fixed them. Shedd, Dogm.

Theol., 1:397—“An event must be _made_ certain, before it can be

_known_ as a certain event.” Turretin, Inst. Theol., loc. 3,

quaes. 12, 18—“Præcipuum fundamentum scientiæ divinæ circa futura

contingentia est deoretum solum.”

Decreeing creation implies decreeing the foreseen results of creation.—To

meet the objection that God might have foreseen the events of the

universe, not because he had decreed each one, but only because he had

decreed to create the universe and institute its laws, we may put the

argument in another form. In eternity there could have been no cause of

the future existence of the universe, outside of God himself, since no

being existed but God himself. In eternity God foresaw that the creation

of the world and the institution of its laws would make certain its actual

history even to the most insignificant details. But God decreed to create

and to institute these laws. In so decreeing he necessarily decreed all

that was to come. In fine, God foresaw the future events of the universe

as certain, because he had decreed to create; but this determination to

create involved also a determination of all the actual results of that

creation; or, in other words, God decreed those results.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 84—“The existence of divine

decrees may be inferred from the existence of natural law.” Law =

certainty = God’s will. Positivists express great contempt for the

doctrine of the eternal purpose of God, yet they consign us to the

iron necessity of physical forces and natural laws. Dr. Robinson

also points out that decrees are “implied in the prophecies. We

cannot conceive that all events should have converged toward the

one great event—the death of Christ—without the intervention of an

eternal purpose.” E. H. Johnson, Outline Syst. Theol., 2d ed.,

251, note—“Reason is confronted by the paradox that the divine

decrees are at once absolute and conditional; the resolution of

the paradox is that God absolutely decreed a conditional system—a

system, however, the workings of which he thoroughly foreknows.”

The rough unhewn stone and the statue into which it will be

transformed are both and equally included in the plan of the

sculptor.

No undecreed event can be foreseen.—We grant that God decrees primarily

and directly his own acts of creation, providence, and grace; but we claim

that this involves also a secondary and indirect decreeing of the acts of

free creatures which he foresees will result therefrom. There is therefore

no such thing in God as _scientia media_, or knowledge of an event that is

to be, though it does not enter into the divine plan; for to say that God

foresees an undecreed event, is to say that he views as future an event

that is merely possible; or, in other words, that he views an event not as

it is.

We recognize only two kinds of knowledge: (1) Knowledge of

undecreed possibles, and (2) foreknowledge of decreed actuals.

_Scientia media_ is a supposed intermediate knowledge between

these two, namely (3) foreknowledge of undecreed actuals. See

further explanations below. We deny the existence of this third

sort of knowledge. We hold that sin is decreed in the sense of

being _rendered certain_ by God’s determining upon a system in

which it was foreseen that sin would exist. The sin of man can be

foreknown, while yet God is not the immediate cause of it. God

knows possibilities, without having decreed them at all. But God

cannot foreknow actualities unless he has by his decree made them

to be certainties of the future. He cannot foreknow that which is

not there to be foreknown. Royce, World and Individual, 2:374,

maintains that God has, not _fore_knowledge, but only _eternal_

knowledge, of temporal things. But we reply that to foreknow how a

moral being _will_ act is no more impossible than to know how a

moral being in given circumstances _would_ act.

Only knowledge of that which is decreed is foreknowledge.—Knowledge of a

plan as ideal or possible may precede decree; but knowledge of a plan as

actual or fixed must follow decree. Only the latter knowledge is properly

_fore_knowledge. God therefore foresees creation, causes, laws, events,

consequences, because he has decreed creation, causes, laws, events,

consequences; that is, because he has embraced all these in his plan. The

denial of decrees logically involves the denial of God’s foreknowledge of

free human actions; and to this Socinians, and some Arminians, are

actually led.

An Arminian example of this denial is found in McCabe,

Foreknowledge of God, and Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies

a Necessity. _Per contra_, see notes on God’s foreknowledge, in

this Compendium, pages 283-286. Pepper: “Divine volition stands

logically between two divisions and kinds of divine knowledge.”

God knew free human actions as _possible_, _before_ he decreed

them; he knew them as _future_, _because_ he decreed them.

Logically, though not chronologically, decree comes before

foreknowledge. When I say, “I know what I will do,” it is evident

that I have determined already, and that my knowledge does not

precede determination, but follows it and is based upon it. It is

therefore not correct to say that God foreknows his decrees. It is

more true to say that he decrees his foreknowledge. He foreknows

the future which he has decreed, and he foreknows it because he

has decreed it. His decrees are eternal, and nothing that is

eternal can be the object of foreknowledge. G. F. Wright, in Bib.

Sac., 1877:723—“The _knowledge_ of God comprehended the details

and incidents of every possible plan. The _choice_ of a plan made

his knowledge determinate as _fore_knowledge.”

There are therefore two kinds of divine knowledge: (1) knowledge

of what may be—of the possible (_scientia simplicis

intelligentiæ_); and (2) knowledge of what is, and is to be,

because God has decreed it (_scientia visionis_). Between these

two Molina, the Spanish Jesuit, wrongly conceived that there was

(3) a middle knowledge of things which were to be, although God

had not decreed them (_scientia media_). This would of course be a

knowledge which God derived, not from himself, but from his

creatures! See Dick, Theology, 1:351. A. S. Carman: “It is

difficult to see how God’s knowledge can be caused from eternity

by something that has no existence until a definite point of

time.” If it be said that what is to be will be “in the nature of

things,” we reply that there is no “nature of things” apart from

God, and that the ground of the objective certainty, as well as of

the subjective certitude corresponding to it, is to be found only

in God himself.

But God’s decreeing to create, when he foresees that certain free

acts of men will follow, is a decreeing of those free acts, in the

only sense in which we use the word decreeing, _viz._, a rendering

certain, or embracing in his plan. No Arminian who believes in

God’s foreknowledge of free human acts has good reason for denying

God’s decrees as thus explained. Surely God did not foreknow that

Adam would exist and sin, whether God determined to create him or

not. Omniscience, then, becomes _fore_knowledge only on condition

of God’s decree. That God’s foreknowledge of free acts is

intuitive does not affect this conclusion. We grant that, while

man can predict free action only so far as it is rational (_i.

e._, in the line of previously dominant motive), God can predict

free action whether it is rational or not. But even God cannot

predict what is not certain to be. God can have intuitive

foreknowledge of free human acts only upon condition of his own

decree to create; and this decree to create, in foresight of all

that will follow, is a decree of what follows. For the Arminian

view, see Watson, Institutes, 2:375-398, 422-448. _Per contra_,

see Hill, Divinity, 512-582; Fiske, in Bib. Sac., April, 1862;

Bennett Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 214-254; Edwards the younger,

1:398-420; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 98-101.

B. From the Divine Wisdom.

It is the part of wisdom to proceed in every undertaking according to a

plan. The greater the undertaking, the more needful a plan. Wisdom,

moreover, shows itself in a careful provision for all possible

circumstances and emergencies that can arise in the execution of its plan.

That many such circumstances and emergencies are uncontemplated and

unprovided for in the plans of men, is due only to the limitations of

human wisdom. It belongs to infinite wisdom, therefore, not only to have a

plan, but to embrace all, even the minutest details, in the plan of the

universe.

No architect would attempt to build a Cologne cathedral without a

plan; he would rather, if possible, have a design for every stone.

The great painter does not study out his picture as he goes along;

the plan is in his mind from the start; preparations for the last

effects have to be made from the beginning. So in God’s work every

detail is foreseen and provided for; sin and Christ entered into

the original plan of the universe. Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:156,

says this implies that God cannot govern the world unless all

things be reduced to the condition of machinery; and that it

cannot be true, for the reason that God’s government is a

government of persons and not of things. But we reply that the

wise statesman governs persons and not things, yet just in

proportion to his wisdom he conducts his administration according

to a preconceived plan. God’s power might, but God’s wisdom would

not, govern the universe without embracing all things, even the

least human action, in his plan.

C. From the Divine Immutability.

What God does, he always purposed to do. Since with him there is no

increase of knowledge or power, such as characterizes finite beings, it

follows that what under any given circumstances he permits or does, he

must have eternally decreed to permit or do. To suppose that God has a

multitude of plans, and that he changes his plan with the exigencies of

the situation, is to make him infinitely dependent upon the varying wills

of his creatures, and to deny to him one necessary element of perfection,

namely, immutability.

God has been very unworthily compared to a chess-player, who will

checkmate his opponent whatever moves he may make (George Harris).

So Napoleon is said to have had a number of plans before each

battle, and to have betaken himself from one to another as fortune

demanded. Not so with God. _Job 23:13—_“he is in one mind, and who

can turn him?” _James 1:17-_“the Father of lights, with whom can

be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning.” Contrast

with this Scripture McCabe’s statement in his Foreknowledge of

God, 62—“This new factor, the godlike liberty of the human will,

is capable of thwarting, and in uncounted instances does thwart,

the divine will, and compel the great I AM to modify his actions,

his purposes, and his plans, in the treatment of individuals and

of communities.”

D. From the Divine Benevolence.

The events of the universe, if not determined by the divine decrees, must

be determined either by chance or by the wills of creatures. It is

contrary to any proper conception of the divine benevolence to suppose

that God permits the course of nature and of history, and the ends to

which both these are moving, to be determined for myriads of sentient

beings by any other force or will than his own. Both reason and

revelation, therefore, compel us to accept the doctrine of the Westminster

Confession, that “God did from all eternity, by the most just and holy

counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes

to pass.”

It would not be benevolent for God to put out of his own power

that which was so essential to the happiness of the universe.

Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 231-243—“The denial of decrees

involves denial of the essential attributes of God, such as

omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence; exhibits him as a

disappointed and unhappy being; implies denial of his universal

providence; leads to a denial of the greater part of our own duty

of submission; weakens the obligations of gratitude.” We give

thanks to God for blessings which come to us through the free acts

of others; but unless God has purposed these blessings, we owe our

thanks to these others and not to God. Dr. A. J. Gordon said well

that a universe without decrees would be as irrational and

appalling as would be an express-train driving on in the darkness

without headlight or engineer, and with no certainty that the next

moment it might not plunge into the abyss. And even Martineau,

Study, 2:108, in spite of his denial of God’s foreknowledge of

man’s free acts, is compelled to say: “It cannot be left to mere

created natures to play unconditionally with the helm of even a

single world and steer it uncontrolled into the haven or on to the

reefs; and some security must be taken for keeping the deflections

within tolerable bounds.” See also Emmons, Works, 4:273-401: and

Princeton Essays, 1:57-73.

III. Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees.

1. That they are inconsistent with the free agency of man.

To this we reply that:

A. The objection confounds the decrees with the execution of the decrees.

The decrees are, like foreknowledge, an act eternal to the divine nature,

and are no more inconsistent with free agency than foreknowledge is. Even

foreknowledge of events implies that those events are fixed. If this

absolute fixity and foreknowledge is not inconsistent with free agency,

much less can that which is more remote from man’s action, namely, the

hidden cause of this fixity and foreknowledge—God’s decrees—be

inconsistent with free agency. If anything be inconsistent with man’s free

agency, it must be, not the decrees themselves, but the execution of the

decrees in creation and providence.

On this objection, see Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 244-249;

Forbes, Predestination and Free Will, 3—“All things are

_predestinated_ by God, both good and evil, but not

_prenecessitated_, that is, causally preördained by him—unless we

would make God the author of sin. Predestination is thus an

indifferent word, in so far as the originating author of anything

is concerned; God being the originator of good, but the creature,

of evil. Predestination therefore means that God included in his

plan of the world every act of every creature, good or bad. Some

acts he predestined causally, others permissively. The certainty

of the fulfilment of all God’s purposes ought to be distinguished

from their necessity.” This means simply that God’s decree is not

the _cause_ of any act or event. God’s decrees may be executed by

the causal efficiency of his creatures, or they may be executed by

his own efficiency. In either case it is, if anything, the

execution, and not the decree, that is inconsistent with human

freedom.

B. The objection rests upon a false theory of free agency—namely, that

free agency implies indeterminateness or uncertainty; in other words, that

free agency cannot coëxist with certainty as to the results of its

exercise. But it is necessity, not certainty, with which free agency is

inconsistent. Free agency is the power of self-determination in view of

motives, or man’s power (_a_) to chose between motives, and (_b_) to

direct his subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen.

Motives are never a cause, but only an occasion; they influence, but never

compel; the man is the cause, and herein is his freedom. But it is also

true that man is never in a state of indeterminateness; never acts without

motive, or contrary to all motives; there is always a reason why he acts,

and herein is his rationality. Now, so far as man acts according to

previously dominant motive—see (_b_) above—we may by knowing his motive

predict his action, and our certainty what that action will be in no way

affects his freedom. We may even bring motives to bear upon others, the

influence of which we foresee, yet those who act upon them may act in

perfect freedom. But if man, influenced by man, may still be free, then

man, influenced by divinely foreseen motives, may still be free, and the

divine decrees, which simply render certain man’s actions, may also be

perfectly consistent with man’s freedom.

We must not assume that decreed ends can be secured only by

compulsion. Eternal purposes do not necessitate efficient

causation on the part of the purposer. Freedom may be the very

means of fulfilling the purpose. E. G. Robinson, Christian

Theology, 74—“Absolute certainty of events, which is all that

omniscience determines respecting them, is not identical with

their necessitation.” John Milton, Christian Doctrine: “Future

events which God has foreseen will happen certainly, but not of

necessity. They will happen certainly, because the divine

prescience will not be deceived; but they will not happen

necessarily, because prescience can have no influence on the

object foreknown, inasmuch as it is only an intransitive action.”

There is, however, a smaller class of human actions by which character is

changed, rather than expressed, and in which the man acts according to a

motive different from that which has previously been dominant—see (_a_)

above. These actions also are foreknown by God, although they cannot be

predicted by man. Man’s freedom in them would be inconsistent with God’s

decrees, if the previous certainty of their occurrence were, not

certainty, but necessity; or, in other words, if God’s decrees were in all

cases decrees efficiently to produce the acts of his creatures. But this

is not the case. God’s decrees may be executed by man’s free causation, as

easily as by God’s; and God’s decreeing this free causation, in decreeing

to create a universe of which he foresees that this causation will be a

part, in no way interferes with the freedom of such causation, but rather

secures and establishes it. Both consciousness and conscience witness that

God’s decrees are not executed by laying compulsion upon the free wills of

men.

The farmer who, after hearing a sermon on God’s decrees, took the

break-neck road instead of the safe one to his home and broke his

wagon in consequence, concluded before the end of his journey that

he at any rate had been predestinated to be a fool, and that he

had made his calling and election sure. Ladd, Philosophy of

Conduct, 146, 187, shows that the will is free, first, by man’s

consciousness of ability, and, secondly, by man’s consciousness of

imputability. By nature, he is _potentially_ self-determining; as

matter of fact, he often _becomes_ self-determining.

Allen, Religious Progress, 110—“The coming church must embrace the

sovereignty of God and the freedom of the will; total depravity

and the divinity of human nature; the unity of God and the triune

distinctions in the Godhead; gnosticism and agnosticism; the

humanity of Christ and his incarnate deity; the freedom of the

Christian man and the authority of the church; individualism and

solidarity; reason and faith; science and theology; miracle and

uniformity of law; culture and piety; the authority of the Bible

as the word of God with absolute freedom of Biblical criticism;

the gift of administration as in the historic episcopate and the

gift of prophecy as the highest sanction of the ministerial

commission; the apostolic succession but also the direct and

immediate call which knows only the succession of the Holy Ghost.”

Without assenting to these latter clauses we may commend the

comprehensive spirit of this utterance, especially with reference

to the vexed question of the relation of divine sovereignty to

human freedom.

It may aid us, in estimating the force of this objection, to note the four

senses in which the term “freedom” may be used. It may be used as

equivalent to (1) _physical_ freedom, or absence of outward constraint;

(2) _formal_ freedom, or a state of moral indeterminateness; (3) _moral_

freedom, or self-determinateness in view of motives; (4) _real_ freedom,

or ability to conform to the divine standard. With the first of these we

are not now concerned, since all agree that the decrees lay no outward

constraint upon men. Freedom in the second sense has no existence, since

all men have character. Free agency, or freedom in the third sense, has

just been shown to be consistent with the decrees. Freedom in the fourth

sense, or real freedom, is the special gift of God, and is not to be

confounded with free agency. The objection mentioned above rests wholly

upon the second of these definitions of free agency. This we have shown to

be false, and with this the objection itself falls to the ground.

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 133-188, gives a good

definition of this fourth kind of freedom: “Freedom is

self-determination by universal ideals. Limiting our ends to those

of family or country is a refined or idealized selfishness.

Freedom is self-determination by universal love for man or by the

kingdom of God. But the free man must then be dependent on God in

everything, because the kingdom of God is a revelation of God.”

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:133—“In being

determined by God we are self-determined; _i. e._, determined by

nothing alien to us, but by our noblest, truest self. The

universal life lives in us. The eternal consciousness becomes our

own; for ‘he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth

in him’_ (1 John 4:16)_.”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 226—“Free will is not the

independence of the creature, but is rather his self-realization

in perfect dependence. Freedom is self-identity with goodness.

Both goodness and freedom are, in their perfectness, in God.

Goodness in a creature is not distinction from, but correspondence

with, the goodness of God. Freedom in a creature is correspondence

with God’s own self-identity with goodness. It is to realize and

to find _himself_, his _true_ self, in Christ, so that God’s love

in us has become a divine response, adequate to, because truly

mirroring, God.” G. S. Lee, The Shadow Christ, 32—.“The ten

commandments could not be chanted. The Israelites sang about

Jehovah and what he had done, but they did not sing about what he

told them to do, and that is why they never did it. The conception

of duty that cannot sing must weep until it learns to sing. This

is Hebrew history.”

“There is a liberty, unsung By poets and by senators unpraised,

Which monarchs cannot grant nor all the powers Of earth and hell

confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud,

Oppressions, prisons, have no power to bind; Which whoso tastes

can be enslaved no more. ’T is liberty of heart, derived from

heaven, Bought with his blood who gave it to mankind, And sealed

with the same token.” Robert Herrick: “Stone walls do not a prison

make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for

a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free,

Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.”

A more full discussion of the doctrine of the Will is given under

Anthropology, Vol. II. It is sufficient here to say that the

Arminian objections to the decrees arise almost wholly from

erroneously conceiving of freedom as the will’s power to decide,

in any given case, against its own character and all the motives

brought to bear upon it. As we shall hereafter see, this is

practically to deny that man has character, or that the will by

its right or wrong moral action gives to itself, as well as to the

intellect and affections, a permanent bent or predisposition to

good or evil. It is to extend the power of contrary choice, a

power which belongs to the sphere of transient volition, over all

those permanent states of intellect, affection, and will which we

call the moral character, and to say that we can change directly

by a single volition that which, as a matter of fact, we can

change only indirectly through process and means. Yet even this

exaggerated view of freedom would seem not to exclude God’s

decrees, or prevent a practical reconciliation of the Arminian and

Calvinistic views, so long as the Arminian grants God’s

foreknowledge of free human acts, and the Calvinist grants that

God’s decree of these acts is not necessarily a decree that God

will efficiently produce them. For a close approximation of the

two views, see articles by Raymond and by A. A. Hodge,

respectively, on the Arminian and the Calvinistic Doctrines of the

Will, in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia, 10:989, 992.

We therefore hold to the certainty of human action, and so part

company with the Arminian. We cannot with Whedon (On the Will),

and Hazard (Man a Creative First Cause), attribute to the will the

freedom of indifference, or the power to act without motive. We

hold with Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 188, that action without

motive, or an act of pure will, is unknown in consciousness (see,

however, an inconsistent statement of Calderwood on page 188 of

the same work). Every future human act will not only be performed

with a motive, but will certainly be one thing rather than

another; and God knows what it will be. Whatever may be the method

of God’s foreknowledge, and whether it be derived from motives or

be intuitive, that foreknowledge presupposes God’s decree to

create, and so presupposes the making certain of the free acts

that follow creation.

But this certainty is not necessity. In reconciling God’s decrees

with human freedom, we must not go to the other extreme, and

reduce human freedom to mere determinism, or the power of the

agent to act out his character in the circumstances which environ

him. Human action is not simply the expression of previously

dominant affections; else Neither Satan nor Adam could have

fallen, nor could the Christian ever sin. We therefore part

company with Jonathan Edwards and his Treatise on the Freedom of

the Will, as well as with the younger Edwards (Works, 1:420),

Alexander (Moral Science, 107), and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theology,

2:278), all of whom follow Jonathan Edwards in identifying

sensibility with the will, in regarding affections as the causes

of volitions, and in speaking of the connection between motive and

action as a necessary one. We hold, on the contrary, that

sensibility and will are two distinct powers, that affections are

occasions but never causes of volitions, and that, while motives

may infallibly persuade, they never compel the will. The power to

make the decision other than it is resides in the will, though it

may never be exercised. With Charnock, the Puritan (Attributes,

1:448-450), we say that “man hath a power to do otherwise than

that which God foreknows he will do.” Since, then, God’s decrees

are not executed by laying compulsion upon human wills, they are

not inconsistent with man’s freedom. See Martineau, Study, 2:237,

249, 258, 261; also article by A. H. Strong, on Modified

Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Baptist Review,

1883:219-243; reprinted in the author’s Philosophy and Religion,

114-128.

2. That they take away all motive for human exertion.

To this we reply that:

(_a_) They cannot thus influence men, since they are not addressed to men,

are not the rule of human action, and become known only after the event.

This objection is therefore the mere excuse of indolence and disobedience.

Men rarely make this excuse in any enterprise in which their hopes

and their interests are enlisted. It is mainly in matters of

religion that men use the divine decrees as an apology for their

sloth and inaction. The passengers on an ocean steamer do not deny

their ability to walk to starboard or to larboard, upon the plea

that they are being carried to their destination by forces beyond

their control. Such a plea would be still more irrational in a

case where the passengers’ inaction, as in case of fire, might

result in destruction to the ship.

(_b_) The objection confounds the decrees of God with fate. But it is to

be observed that fate is unintelligent, while the decrees are framed by a

personal God in infinite wisdom; fate is indistinguishable from material

causation and leaves no room for human freedom, while the decrees exclude

all notion of physical necessity; fate embraces no moral ideas or ends,

while the decrees make these controlling in the universe.

North British Rev., April, 1870—“Determinism and predestination

spring from premises which lie in quite separate regions of

thought. The predestinarian is obliged by his theology to admit

the existence of a free will in God, and, as a matter of fact, he

does admit it in the devil. But the final consideration which puts

a great gulf between the determinist and the predestinarian is

this, that the latter asserts the reality of the vulgar notion of

moral desert. Even if he were not obliged by his interpretation of

Scripture to assert this, he would be obliged to assert it in

order to help out his doctrine of eternal reprobation.”

Hawthorne expressed his belief in human freedom when be said that

destiny itself had often been worsted in the attempt to get him

out to dinner. Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, quotes the

Indian’s excuse for getting drunk: “The Great Spirit made all

things for some use, and whatsoever use they were made for, to

that use they must be put. The Great Spirit made rum for Indians

to get drunk with, and so it must be.” Martha, in Isabel Carnaby,

excuses her breaking of dishes by saying: “It seems as if it was

to be. It is the thin edge of the wedge that in time will turn

again and rend you.” Seminary professor: “Did a man ever die

before his time?” Seminary student: “I never knew of such a case.”

The decrees of God, considered as God’s all-embracing plan, leave

room for human freedom.

(_c_) The objection ignores the logical relation between the decree of the

end and the decree of the means to secure it. The decrees of God not only

ensure the end to be obtained, but they ensure free human action as

logically prior thereto. All conflict between the decrees and human

exertion must therefore be apparent and not real. Since consciousness and

Scripture assure us that free agency exists, it must exist by divine

decree; and though we may be ignorant of the method in which the decrees

are executed, we have no right to doubt either the decrees or the freedom.

They must be held to be consistent, until one of them is proved to be a

delusion.

The man who carries a vase of gold-fish does not prevent the fish

from moving unrestrainedly within the vase. The double track of a

railway enables a formidable approaching train to slip by without

colliding with our own. Our globe takes us with it, as it rushes

around the sun, yet we do our ordinary work without interruption.

The two movements which at first sight seem inconsistent with each

other are really parts of one whole. God’s plan and man’s effort

are equally in harmony. Myers, Human Personality, 2:272, speaks of

“molecular motion amid molar calm.”

Dr. Duryea: “The way of life has two fences. There is an Arminian

fence to keep us out of Fatalism; and there is a Calvinistic fence

to keep us out of Pelagianism. Some good brethren like to walk on

the fences. But it is hard in that way to keep one’s balance. And

it is needless, for there is plenty of room between the fences.

For my part I prefer to walk in the road.” Archibald Alexander’s

statement is yet better: “Calvinism is the broadest of systems. It

regards the divine sovereignty and the freedom of the human will

as the two sides of a roof which come together at a ridgepole

above the clouds. Calvinism accepts both truths. A system which

denies either one of the two has only half a roof over its head.”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:176, and The Best Bread, 109—“The

system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one

straight line but two, and no man will ever get a right view of

the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once....

These two facts [of divine sovereignty and of human freedom] are

parallel lines; I cannot make them unite, but you cannot make them

cross each other.” John A. Broadus: “You can see only two sides of

a building at once; if you go around it, you see two different

sides, but the first two are hidden. This is true if you are on

the ground. But if you get up upon the roof or in a balloon, you

can see that there are four sides, and you can see them all

together. So our finite minds can take in sovereignty and freedom

alternately, but not simultaneously. God from above can see them

both, and from heaven we too may be able to look down and see.”

(_d_) Since the decrees connect means and ends together, and ends are

decreed only as the result of means, they encourage effort instead of

discouraging it. Belief in God’s plan that success shall reward toil,

incites to courageous and persevering effort. Upon the very ground of

God’s decree, the Scripture urges us to the diligent use of means.

God has decreed the harvest only as the result of man’s labor in

sowing and reaping; God decrees wealth to the man who works and

saves; so answers are decreed to prayer, and salvation to faith.

Compare Paul’s declaration of God’s purpose (_Acts 27:22,

24—_“there shall be no loss of life among you.... God hath granted

thee all them that sail with thee”) with his warning to the

centurion and sailors to use the means of safety (_verse

31—_“Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved”). See

also _Phil. 2:12, 13—_“work out your own salvation with fear and

trembling, for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to

work, for his good pleasure”; _Eph. 2:10—_“we are his workmanship,

created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared

that we should walk in them”; _Deut. 29:29—_“the secret things

belong unto Jehovah our God: but the things that are revealed

belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all

the words of this law.” See Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures,

252-354.

_Ps. 59:10 (A. V.)—_“The God of my mercy shall prevent me”—shall

anticipate, or go before, me; _Is. 65:24—_“before they call, I

will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear”; _Ps.

23:2—_“He leadeth me”; _John 10:3—_“calleth his own sheep by name,

and leadeth them out.” These texts describe prevenient grace in

prayer, in conversion, and in Christian work. Plato called reason

and sensibility a mismatched pair, one of which was always getting

ahead of the other. Decrees and freedom _seem_ to be mismatched,

but they are not so. Even Jonathan Edwards, with his deterministic

theory of the will, could, in his sermon on Pressing into the

Kingdom, insist on the use of means, and could appeal to men as if

they had the power to choose between the motives of self and of

God. God’s sovereignty and human freedom are like the positive and

the negative poles of the magnet,—they are inseparable from one

another, and are both indispensable elements in the attraction of

the gospel.

Peter Damiani, the great monk-cardinal, said that the sin he found

it hardest to uproot was his disposition to laughter. The homage

paid to asceticism is the homage paid to the conqueror. But not

all conquests are worthy of homage. Better the words of Luther:

“If our God may make excellent large pike and good Rhenish wine, I

may very well venture to eat and drink. Thou mayest enjoy every

pleasure in the world that is not sinful; thy God forbids thee

not, but rather wills it. And it is pleasing to the dear God

whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.”

But our freedom has its limits. Martha Baker Dunn: “A man fishing

for pickerel baits his hook with a live minnow and throws him into

the water. The little minnow seems to be swimming gaily at his own

free will, but just the moment he attempts to move out of his

appointed course he begins to realize that there is a hook in his

back. That is what we find out when we try to swim against the

stream of God’s decrees.”

3. That they make God the author of sin.

To this we reply:

(_a_) They make God, not the author of sin, but the author of free beings

who are themselves the authors of sin. God does not decree efficiently to

work evil desires or choices in men. He decrees sin only in the sense of

decreeing to create and preserve those who will sin; in other words, he

decrees to create and preserve human wills which, in their own self-chosen

courses, will be and do evil. In all this, man attributes sin to himself

and not to God, and God hates, denounces, and punishes sin.

Joseph’s brethren were none the less wicked for the fact that God

meant their conduct to result in good (_Gen. 50:20_). Pope Leo X

and his indulgences brought on the Reformation, but he was none

the less guilty. Slaveholders would have been no more excusable,

even if they had been able to prove that the negro race was cursed

in the curse of Canaan (_Gen. 9:25—_“Cursed be Canaan; a servant

of servants shall he be unto his brethren”). Fitch, in Christian

Spectator, 3:601—“There can be and is a purpose of God which is

not an _efficient_ purpose. It embraces the voluntary acts of

moral beings, without creating those acts by divine efficiency.”

See Martineau, Study, 2:107, 136.

_Mat. 26:24—_“The Son of man goeth even as it is written of him:

but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed!

good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was

appointed that Christ should suffer, but that did not make men

less free agents, nor diminish the guilt of their treachery and

injustice. Robert G. Ingersoll asked: “Why did God create the

devil?” We reply that God did not create the devil,—it was the

devil who made the devil. God made a holy and free spirit who

abused his liberty, himself created sin, and so made himself a

devil.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:299—“Evil has been referred to 1.

an extra-divine principle—to one or many evil spirits, or to fate,

or to matter—at all events to a principle limiting the divine

power; 2. a want or defect in the Deity himself, either his

imperfect wisdom or his imperfect goodness; 3. human culpability,

either a universal imperfection of human nature, or particular

transgressions of the first men.” The third of these explanations

is the true one: the first is irrational; the second is

blasphemous. Yet this second is the explanation of Omar Khayyám,

Rubáiyat, stanzas 80, 81—“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with

gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with

predestined evil round Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. Oh

Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise

devise the snake: For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is

blackened—man’s forgiveness give—and take!” And David Harum

similarly says: “If I’ve done anything to be sorry for, I’m

willing to be forgiven.”

(_b_) The decree to permit sin is therefore not an efficient but a

permissive decree, or a decree to permit, in distinction from a decree to

produce by his own efficiency. No difficulty attaches to such a decree to

permit sin, which does not attach to the actual permission of it. But God

does actually permit sin, and it must be right for him to permit it. It

must therefore be right for him to decree to permit it. If God’s holiness

and wisdom and power are not impugned by the actual existence of moral

evil, they are not impugned by the original decree that it should exist.

Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:100—“The sun is not the _cause_ of the

darkness that follows its setting, but only the _occasion_”;

254—“If by the author of sin be meant the sinner, the agent, or

the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing—so it would be a

reproach and blasphemy to suppose God to be the author of sin....

But if by author of sin is meant the permitter or non-hinderer of

sin, and at the same time a disposer of the state of events in

such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and

purposes, _that sin_, if it be permitted and not hindered, _will

most certainly follow_, I do not deny that God is the author of

sin: it is no reproach to the Most High to be _thus_ the author of

sin.” On the objection that the doctrine of decrees imputes to God

two wills, and that he has foreordained what he has forbidden, see

Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 250-252—“A ruler may forbid

treason; but his command does not oblige him to do all in his

power to prevent disobedience to it. It may promote the good of

his kingdom to suffer the treason to be committed, and the traitor

to be punished according to law. That in view of this resulting

good he chooses not to prevent the treason, does not imply any

contradiction or opposition of will in the monarch.”

An ungodly editor excused his vicious journalism by saying that he

was not ashamed to describe anything which Providence had

permitted to happen. But “permitted” here had an implication of

causation. He laid the blame of the evil upon Providence. He was

ashamed to describe many things that were good and which God

actually caused, while he was not ashamed to describe the immoral

things which God did not cause, but only permitted men to cause.

In this sense we may assent to Jonathan Edwards’s words: “The

divine Being is not the author of sin, but only disposes things in

such a manner that sin will certainly ensue.” These words are

found in his treatise on Original Sin. In his Essay on Freedom of

the Will, he adds a doctrine of causation which we must repudiate:

“The essence of virtue and vice, as they exist in the disposition

of the heart, and are manifested in the acts of the will, lies not

in their _Cause_ but in their _Nature_.” We reply that sin could

not be condemnable in its nature, if God and not man were its

cause.

Robert Browning, Mihrab Shah: “Wherefore should any evil hap to

man—From ache of flesh to agony of soul—Since God’s All-mercy

mates All-potency? Nay, why permits he evil to himself—man’s sin,

accounted such? Suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit

inhabitant—Man pure of evil in thought, word and deed—were it not

well? Then, wherefore otherwise?” Fairbairn answers the question,

as follows, in his Christ in Modern Theology, 456—“Evil once

intended may be vanquished by being allowed; but were it hindered

by an act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the

evil which had compelled the Creator to retrace his steps. And, to

carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possibility of

evil had hindered the creative action of God, then he would have

been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow. But why did he

create a being capable of sinning? Only so could he create a being

capable of obeying. The ability to do good implies the capability

of doing evil. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the

creature who was without this double ability might be a machine,

but could be no child. Moral perfection can be attained, but

cannot be created; God can make a being capable of moral action,

but not a being with all the fruits of moral action garnered

within him.”

(_c_) The difficulty is therefore one which in substance clings to all

theistic systems alike—the question why moral evil is permitted under the

government of a God infinitely holy, wise, powerful, and good. This

problem is, to our finite powers, incapable of full solution, and must

remain to a great degree shrouded in mystery. With regard to it we can

only say:

Negatively,—that God does not permit moral evil because he is not

unalterably opposed to sin; nor because moral evil was unforeseen and

independent of his will; nor because he could not have prevented it in a

moral system. Both observation and experience, which testify to multiplied

instances of deliverance from sin without violation of the laws of man’s

being, forbid as to limit the power of God.

Positively,—we seem constrained to say that God permits moral evil because

moral evil, though in itself abhorrent to his nature, is yet the incident

of a system adapted to his purpose of self-revelation; and further,

because it is his wise and sovereign will to institute and maintain this

system of which moral evil is an incident, rather than to withhold his

self-revelation or to reveal himself through another system in which moral

evil should be continually prevented by the exercise of divine power.

There are four questions which neither Scripture nor reason

enables us completely to solve and to which we may safely say that

only the higher knowledge of the future state will furnish the

answers. These questions are, first, how can a holy God permit

moral evil? secondly, how could a being created pure ever fall?

thirdly, how can we be responsible for inborn depravity? fourthly,

how could Christ justly suffer? The first of these questions now

confronts us. A complete theodicy (Θεός, God, and δική, justice)

would be a vindication of the justice of God in permitting the

natural and moral evil that exists under his government. While a

complete theodicy is beyond our powers, we throw some light upon

God’s permission of moral evil by considering (1) that freedom of

will is necessary to virtue; (2) that God suffers from sin more

than does the sinner; (3) that, with the permission of sin, God

provided a redemption; and, (4) that God will eventually overrule

all evil for good.

It is possible that the elect angels belong to a moral system in

which sin is prevented by constraining motives. We cannot deny

that God could prevent sin in a moral system. But it is very

doubtful whether God could prevent sin in the _best_ moral system.

The most perfect freedom is indispensable to the attainment of the

highest virtue. Spurgeon: “There could have been no moral

government without permission to sin. God could have created

blameless puppets, but they could have had no virtue.” Behrends:

“If moral beings were incapable of perversion, man would have had

all the virtue of a planet,—that is, no virtue at all.” Sin was

permitted, then, only because it could be overruled for the

greatest good. This greatest good, we may add, is not simply the

highest nobility and virtue of the creature, but also the

revelation of the Creator. But for sin, God’s justice and God’s

mercy alike would have been unintelligible to the universe. E. G.

Robinson: “God could not have revealed his character so well

without moral evil as with moral evil.”

Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, tells us that it was God’s plan to

make man in his own image: “To create man, and then leave him

Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him

too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all

unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made

perfect as a thing of course.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268-270,

324, holds that sin and wickedness is an absolute evil, but an

evil permitted to exist because the effacement of it would mean

the effacement at the same time both for God and man, of the

possibility of reaching the highest spiritual good. See also

Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:108; Momerie, Origin of Evil; St.

Clair, Evil Physical and Moral; Voysey, Mystery of Pain, Death and

Sin.

C. G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Studies, 26,

27—“Infinite goodness, knowledge and power imply only that, if a

universe were made, it would be the best that was naturally

possible.” To say that God could not be the author of a universe

in which there is so much of evil, he says, “assumes that a better

universe, upon the whole, was a natural possibility. It assumes

that a universe of moral beings could, under a moral government

administered in the wisest and best manner, be wholly restrained

from sin; but this needs proof, and never can be proved.... The

best possible universe may not be the best conceivable universe.

Apply the legal maxim, ‘The defendant is to have the benefit of

the doubt, and that in proportion to the established character of

his reputation.’ There is so much clearly indicating the

benevolence of God, that we may _believe_ in his benevolence,

where we cannot _see_ it.”

For advocacy of the view that God cannot prevent evil in a moral

system, see Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 17; Young, The Mystery,

or Evil not from God; Bledsoe, Theodicy; N. W. Taylor, Moral

Government, 1:288-349; 2:327-356. According to Dr. Taylor’s view,

God has not a complete control over the moral universe; moral

agents can do wrong under every possible influence to prevent it;

God prefers, all things considered, that all his creatures should

be holy and happy, and does all in his power to make them so; the

existence of sin is not on the whole for the best; sin exists

because God cannot prevent it in a moral system; the blessedness

of God is actually impaired by the disobedience of his creatures.

For criticism of these views, see Tyler, Letters on the New Haven

Theology, 129, 219. Tyler argues that election and non-election

imply power in God to prevent sin; that _permitting_ is not mere

_submitting_ to something which he could not possibly prevent. We

would add that as a matter of fact God has preserved holy angels,

and that there are “just men” who have been “made perfect” (_Heb.

12:23_) without violating the laws of moral agency. We infer that

God could have so preserved Adam. The history of the church leads

us to believe that there is no sinner so stubborn that God cannot

renew his heart,—even a Saul can be turned into a Paul. We

hesitate therefore to ascribe limits to God’s power. While Dr.

Taylor held that God could not prevent sin in _a_ moral system,

that is, in _any_ moral system, Dr. Park is understood to hold the

greatly preferable view that God cannot prevent sin in the _best_

moral system. Flint, Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth, 59—“The

alternative is, not evil or no evil, but evil or the miraculous

prevention of evil.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:406-422.

But even granting that the present is the best moral system, and

that in such a system evil cannot be prevented consistently with

God’s wisdom and goodness, the question still remains how the

decree to initiate such a system can consist with God’s

fundamental attribute of holiness. Of this insoluble mystery we

must say as Dr. John Brown, in Spare Hours, 273, says of Arthur H.

Hallam’s Theodicæa Novissima: “As was to be expected, the

tremendous subject remains where he found it. His glowing love and

genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom, but it is as

brief as the lightning in the collied night—the jaws of darkness

do devour it up—this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and

dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, ‘all

dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,’ no steady ray has ever or will

ever come; over its face its own darkness must brood, till he to

whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the

night shineth as the day, says ‘Let there be light!’ ”

We must remember, however, that the decree of redemption is as old

as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in

Christ shows at how great a cost to God was permitted the fall of

the race in Adam. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement

for sin and a way of escape from it. Shedd, Dogm. Theol.,

1:388—“The permission of sin has cost God more than it has man. No

sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by

any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God.

This shows that God is not acting selfishly in permitting it.” On

the permission of moral evil, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s ed.,

177, 232—“The Government of God, and Christianity, as Schemes

imperfectly Comprehended”; Hill, System of Divinity, 528-559;

Ulrici, art.: Theodicée, in Herzog’s Encyclopädie; Cunningham,

Historical Theology, 2:416-489; Patton, on Retribution and the

Divine Purpose, in Princeton Rev., 1878:16-23; Bib. Sac,

20:471-488; Wood, The Witness of Sin.

IV. Concluding Remarks.

1. Practical uses of the doctrine of decrees.

(_a_) It inspires humility by its representation of God’s unsearchable

counsels and absolute sovereignty. (_b_) It teaches confidence in him who

has wisely ordered our birth, our death, and our surroundings, even to the

minutest particulars, and has made all things work together for the

triumph of his kingdom and the good of those who love him; (_c_) It shows

the enemies of God that, as their sins have been foreseen and provided for

in God’s plan, so they can never, while remaining in their sins, hope to

escape their decreed and threatened penalty. (_d_) It urges the sinner to

avail himself of the appointed means of grace, if he would be counted

among the number of those for whom God has decreed salvation.

This doctrine is one of those advanced teachings of Scripture

which requires for its understanding a matured mind and a deep

experience. The beginner in the Christian life may not see its

value or even its truth, but with increasing years it will become

a staff to lean upon. In times of affliction, obloquy, and

persecution, the church has found in the decrees of God, and in

the prophecies in which these decrees are published, her strong

consolation. It is only upon the basis of the decrees that we can

believe that “all things work together for good”_ (Rom. 8:28)_ or

pray “Thy will be done”_ (Mat. 6:10)_.

It is a striking evidence of the truth of the doctrine that even

Arminians pray and sing like Calvinists. Charles Wesley, the

Arminian, can write: “He wills that I should holy be—What can

withstand his will? The counsel of his grace in me He surely will

fulfill.” On the Arminian theory, prayer that God will soften hard

hearts is out of place,—the prayer should be offered to the

sinner; for it is his will, not God’s, that is in the way of his

salvation. And yet this doctrine of Decrees, which at first sight

might seem to discourage effort, is the greatest, in fact is the

only effectual, incentive to effort. For this reason Calvinists

have been the most strenuous advocates of civil liberty. Those who

submit themselves most unreservedly to the sovereignty of God are

most delivered from the fear of man. Whitefield the Calvinist, and

not Wesley the Arminian, originated the great religious movement

in which the Methodist church was born (see McFetridge, Calvinism

in History, 153), and Spurgeon’s ministry has been as fruitful in

conversions as Finney’s. See Froude, Essay on Calvinism; Andrew

Fuller, Calvinism and Socinianism compared in their Practical

Effects; Atwater, Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton

Review, 1876:73; J. A. Smith, Historical Lectures.

Calvinism logically requires the separation of Church and State:

though Calvin did not see this, the Calvinist Roger Williams did.

Calvinism logically requires a republican form of government:

Calvin introduced laymen into the government of the church, and

the same principle requires civil liberty as its correlate.

Calvinism holds to individualism and the direct responsibility of

the individual to God. In the Netherlands, in Scotland, in

England, in America, Calvinism has powerfully influenced the

development of civil liberty. Ranke: “John Calvin was virtually

the founder of America.” Motley: “To the Calvinists more than to

any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland,

England and America are due.” John Fiske, The Beginnings of New

England: “Perhaps not one of the mediæval popes was more despotic

than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promulgation of

his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind have taken

towards personal freedom.... It was a religion fit to inspire men

who were to be called to fight for freedom, whether in the marshes

of the Netherlands or on the moors of Scotland.”

Æsop, when asked what was the occupation of Zeus, replied: “To

humble the exalted and to exalt the humble.” “I accept the

universe,” said Margaret Fuller. Some one reported this remark to

Thomas Carlyle. “Gad! she’d better!” he replied. Dr. John Watson

(Ian McLaren): “The greatest reinforcement religion could have in

our time would be a return to the ancient belief in the

sovereignty of God.” Whittier: “All is of God that is and is to

be, And God is good. Let this suffice us still Resting in

childlike trust upon his will Who moves to his great ends

unthwarted by the ill.” Every true minister preaches Arminianism

and prays Calvinism. This means simply that there is more, in

God’s love and in God’s purposes, than man can state or

comprehend. Beecher called Spurgeon a camel with one

hump—Calvinism. Spurgeon called Beecher a camel without any hump:

“He does not know what he believes, and you never know where to

find him.”

Arminians sing: “Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul

on thee”; yet John Wesley wrote to the Calvinist Toplady, the

author of the hymn: “Your God is my devil.” Calvinists replied

that it was better to have the throne of the universe vacant than

to have it filled by such a pitiful nonentity as the Arminians

worshiped. It was said of Lord Byron that all his life he believed

in Calvinism, and hated it. Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly, in

all his novels except Elsie Venner, makes the orthodox thinblooded

and weakkneed, while his heretics are all strong in body. Dale,

Ephesians, 52—“Of the two extremes, the suppression of man which

was the offense of Calvinism, and the suppression of God which was

the offense against which Calvinism so fiercely protested, the

fault and error of Calvinism was the nobler and grander.... The

most heroic forms of human courage, strength and righteousness

have been found in men who in their theology seemed to deny the

possibility of human virtue and made the will of God the only real

force in the universe.”

2. True method of preaching the doctrine.

(_a_) We should most carefully avoid exaggeration or unnecessarily

obnoxious statement. (_b_) We should emphasize the fact that the decrees

are not grounded in arbitrary will, but in infinite wisdom. (_c_) We

should make it plain that whatever God does or will do, he must from

eternity have purposed to do. (_d_) We should illustrate the doctrine so

far as possible by instances of completeness and far-sightedness in human

plans of great enterprises. (_e_) We may then make extended application of

the truth to the encouragement of the Christian and the admonition of the

unbeliever.

For illustrations of foresight, instance Louis Napoleon’s planning

the Suez Canal, and declaring his policy as Emperor, long before

he ascended the throne of France. For instances of practical

treatment of the theme in preaching, see Bushnell, Sermon on Every

Man’s Life a Plan of God, in Sermons for the New Life; Nehemiah

Adams, Evenings with the Doctrines, 243; Spurgeon’s Sermon on _Ps.

44:3—_“Because thou hadst a favor unto them.” Robert Browning,

Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in

his hand Who saith ‘A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust

God: See all nor be afraid!’ ”

Shakespeare, King Lear, 1:2—“This is the excellent foppery of the

world that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our

own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon

and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by

heavenly compulsion, and all that we are evil in by a divine

thrusting on; an admirable evasion of man to lay his disposition

to the charge of a star!” All’s Well: “Our remedies oft in

ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives

us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we

ourselves are dull.” Julius Cæsar, 1:2—“Men at some time are

masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our

stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”