THE DOCTRINE OF PREDESTINATION.

1 PETER, i. 2.

Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father.

THE doctrine of Predestination, the last subject which I proposed to consider, has been so frequently involved in metaphysical obscurity, and disgraced by enthusiastical conceit, that men of moderate principles have been averse from admitting it in any sense. Yet, even in its harshest construction, we cannot deny, that it has sometimes found advocates among writers of worth and talent, although it has been thus generally supported by those, who possessed more vanity than piety, and zeal than ability. This, above all other controversies, has contributed to augment the scorn of infidels, to dissolve the bonds of Christian charity, and obliterate the characteristical simplicity of Gospel redemption. While the wise have been perplexed by the turn which its discussions have occasionally taken, the weak have been alarmed, and the feelings even of the good lost in its circuitous mazes, almost excited to despair.

The unfathomable depths of divine prescience and predetermination human reason in vain at

tempts to sound; finite faculties to scan infinite; the limited intellect of man to comprehend the immensity of the Godhead. Erasmus, a peculiar favourite with the reformers of our own country, when contemplating this inexplicable subject, observed, that in the Holy Scriptures there are certain secret recesses, which God is unwilling for us too minutely to explore, and which if we endeavour to explore, in proportion as we penetrate further and further, our minds become more and more oppressed with darkness and stupefaction, that thus we might acknowledge the inscrutable majesty of the Divine Wisdom, and the imbecility of the human mind. Congenial also with the feelings and sentiments of Erasmus upon this point, were those of Luther. To acquire any knowledge, he remarked, of a Deity not revealed in Scripture, to know what his existence is, his actions, and dispositions, belongs not to me; my duty is only this; to know what are his precepts, his promises, and his threatenings. Pernicious and pestilent is the thought of investigating causes, and brings with it inevitable ruin, especially when we ascend too high, and wish to philosophise upon Predestination.

How differently Calvin felt upon the same subject, and with what little reserve, or rather with what bold temerity, he laboured to scrutinise the unrevealed Divinity, is too well known, to require any thing beyond a bare allusion to the circumstance, His sentiments, however, as on a former occasion I noticed, were much less regarded by our reformers,

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than some are disposed to allow; and upon the ticular question before us, so far were they from having attained their full celebrity at the period under consideration, that they were not taught without opposition, even in his own unimportant territory of Geneva. For at that precise æra he was publicly accused of making God the author of sin; and although not contented with silencing, he first imprisoned, and afterwards banished, his accuser, yet he could not expel the opinions of his adversary.

Turning, then, from the devious track which he was pursuing, our reformers, as generally on other occasions, trod in the wary steps of the Lutherans, who, while the Church of Rome maintained a predestination to life of one man in preference to another individually, on account of personal merit, taught on the other hand a gratuitous predestination of Christians collectively, of those, whom God has chosen in Christ out of mankind; and by this single point of difference were the contending opinions principally contradistinguished.

My object in the present Lecture will be, to point out the scholastical and Lutheran sentiments upon this much agitated question, reserving those of our own Church for a future consideration.

With us the system of Calvin for so long a period superseded every other, and even still retains so many zealous advocates, that to a modern ear the 'very term predestination seems to convey a meaning only conformable with his particular system. It should,

however, be observed, that the word was in familiar use for centuries before the Reformation, in a sense very different from what he imputed to it; not as preceding the divine prescience, but as resulting from it, much in the same sense as that in which it has since been supported by the Arminians. Yet, obvious as this appears, writers of respectability strangely persuade themselves, that immediately prior to the Reformation the doctrines of the Church of Rome were completely Calvinistical; a conclusion, to which certainly none can subscribe, who are sufficiently conversant with the favourite productions of the time; who possess enough of fortitude to encounter the barbarisms of scholastical argument, and of patience to investigate its real object. So far, indeed, was this from being the fact, that Calvin peculiarly prided himself in departing from the common definition of the term, which had long been adopted by the adherents of the schools, and retained with a scrupulous precision. For while they held, that the expression prædestinati is exclusively applicable to the elect, whom God, foreknowing as meritorious objects of his mercy, predestinates to life; and appropriated that of præsciti to the non-elect, whose perseverance in transgression is simply foreknown; he, on the other side, treating the distinction as a frivolous subterfuge, contended, that God, decreeing the final doom of the elect and non-elect irrespectively, predestinates both, not subsequently, but previously to all foreknowledge of their individual dispositions, espe

cially devotes the latter to destruction through the medium of crime, and creates them by a fatal destiny to perish. Whatsoever therefore modern conjecture may have attributed to the scholastics, it is certain, that, abhorring every speculation, which tends in the remotest degree to make God the author of sin, they believed, that only salutary good is predestinated; grace to those, who deserve it congruously, and glory to those, who deserve it condignly.

But to enter more particularly into their leading opinions upon this subject, they maintained, that Almighty God, before the foundations of the world were laid, surveying in his comprehensive idea, or, as they phrased it, in his prescience of simple intelligence, the possibilities of all things, before he determined their actual existence, foresaw that if mankind were created, although he willed the salvation of all, and was inclined to assist all indifferently, yet that some would deserve eternal happiness, and others eternal misery; and that therefore he approved and elected the former, but disapproved or reprobated the latter. Thus grounding election upon foreknowledge, they contemplated it, not as an arbitrary principle, separating one individual from another, under the influence of a blind chance, or an irrational caprice; but, on the contrary, as a wise and just one, which presupposes a diversity of nature between those who are accepted, and those who are rejected.

Persuaded, then, that God is the fountain of all