ELECTION AND REPROBATION

SCRIPTURALLY ILLUSTRATED.

This article, reader, is designed as a sequel to the one foregoing, and in this many important points will be cleared up, which in that were left out of view, for I wish to avoid fatiguing your mind by over-long articles; and I hope, moreover, to gain your attention the better by varying the style of the whole as much as possible for this purpose we shall prosecute the residue of this branch of our discussion in a conversational form; the parties in the conversation are supposed to be a Calvinist, an Arminian, and the author.

Calvinist. I most fully concur in your conclusion, that absolute foreknowledge necessarily implies absolute foreordination; and therefore that all things exist agreeably to the divine will and appointment: I often tell my Arminian brethren that their notion of a God who leaves the most momentous affairs to be determined by contingencies, is but little, if any, better than atheism; because, like it, it makes it a matter of mere chance whether existing things shall issue in a desirable order and harmony, or whether they shall progress from bad to worse to eternity even in heaven we may not be secure against the bad effects of free agency; another rebellion may take place there, another battle, and another expulsion of a part of its blissful inhabitants to the dwelling place of the damned.

Arminian. But you forget, sir, that we have the positive word of Jehovah, that the state of the redeemed in heaven shall be one of changeless felicity.

Calvinist. Yes, he has so promised, I grant, and he may mean that such shall be the case; but it is none the more certain for that, if your doctrine be true, for he is constantly breaking through his purposes, and doing acts which he meant not to do! He meant that sin should never enter the world, yet it entered; he meant that man should live eternally in Eden, yet he drove him out; he meant that man should be immortal, yet he dies; he meant too that his Son should save the world, yet by much the larger part of it is to be damned! In like manner, he may very sincerely

mean that our future bliss shall be changeless, yet it may prove quite otherwise; and the time in future ages may come, when all the purity and the bliss in existence may be confined to his own essence, and all the universe besides may be a chaos of sin and desolation.

Author. And besides that, my friend Arminian, God, you say, does not interfere with the freedom of the will, and therefore, he cannot keep you in heaven if he would, provided you should make up your mind not to stay there. If you can point out a way in which, consistently with free agency, he can prevent you from sinning in heaven, you will show a way by which he could have prevented our sinning on earth, and drawing down infinite ruin upon our heads: if you say that he did not choose to employ that way, you in effect assert that he did not choose to save us, by the only mode practicable, from sin and eternal woe! And what is this but taking Calvinistic ground outright?

Calvinist. Well, to continue the subject with which I begun, I am heartily glad to find that we can travel the same road with regard to the divine decrees, and the utter exclusion of human works and human will from the business of salvation; but our road forks at length, I perceive; you assume that God has decreed to save all men, and that in due time he will effectually call and bring them in, if not in time, at some period beyond; here, then, we must part, for our road branches into two, between which there is a wide separation. You admit the doctrine of election to be scriptural; why not then the doctrine of reprobation also, for the one presupposes the other?

Author. Not always. Do our elections at the polls presuppose the reprobation of the public? On the contrary, the good of the mass, who are not elected, is consulted, and designed to be subserved by the instrumentality of those who are. When an individual is proposed for an office among us, we inquire whether he will be likely to prove a faithful public servant-whether he will be true to the interests of his constituents-and being satisfied on this head, we give him our suffrages; thus it is seen, that in elect. ing some to distinguished places, instead of reprobating the residue, we propose the general good. God elects on the same principle. Why were the Jews elected to be God's peculiar people Evidently that the true worship of God might be pre

we are deserving of the great Jehovah's infinite displeasure! Why, my dear sir, one must have a credulity equal to an earthquake to swallow all this!

Author. You swallow it, nevertheless, my friend, as well as he, for I have proven sin to have been foreordained on your principles as well as on his; your notion of man's free agency I have shown to be a fantasm, and consequently, if it is unjust and cruel in God to inflict endless suffering on his ground, it is equally so on your's. The doctrine of endless misery is equally indefensible on either; it reflects equal discredit upon the divine character on both Calvinist and Arminian. Yes, if mere human reason is to be the judge.

Author. As a human being, I can have no other than human reason; I must either exercise that, or none; if none, why are the claims of God upon my love, my homage, my confidence, pressed upon my consideration? If my understanding cannot comprehend the acts of my Creator, I cannot then know whether they are wise or foolish, good or evil, and therefore I cannot tell whether he is entitled to my love or my hatred, my admiration or my contempt. The very fact of our being called on to adore and serve him, presupposes our capacity to understand the nature and the grounds of our obligations to him. Away! then, with your senseless decrials of human reason, for Jehovah himself has honored it by frequent appeals to it in his word.

Calvinist. Well, waiving that matter for the present, let us attend further to the original point between us: you have shown that election does not necessarily imply reprobation. I grant it does not, but I still contend that there are some cases of special reprobation brought to view in the scriptures. Take the following as instances: "But if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost in whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ who is the image of God, should shine unto them." (2 Cor. iv. 3, 4.) "And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness." (2 Thes. ii. 11, 12.)

Author. I have not meant to deny the scripture doctrine of reprobation; on the contrary, I have shown that whilst some are

called to eminent gospel privileges, others, (at least in this life,) are excluded from all participation therein. Yet, thanks to God! we are not left in hopeless darkness as to the final fate of even these reprobates; the great apostle has most satisfactorily cleared up this point: he has shown that there is to be an eventual and universal ingathering of reprobated Israel, when the fulness of the (once rejected, but subsequently elected) Gentiles be come in; in the very casting off of the Jewish people, mercy was designed to the rest of the world. "I say then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid: but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, for to provoke them to jealousy. Now, if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness? For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?" (Rom. xi. 11, 12, 15.) This will show the purpose of God in sending them "strong delusions ;" and it also shows us the end of the damnation consequent thereof: the same is also expressed in the following. "For as ye in times past have not believed God, yet have now obtained mercy through their unbelief; even so have these also now not believed, that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy. For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all.” (Ibid. 30-32.) We see then that the “lost,” to whom, in the days of the apostles, the gospel was "hid," were not by Paul considered as irrecoverably so; it was "the lost" whom Christ came to seek and to save." Neither does it follow, that because some seem at the present in a far-gone condition of darkness and sin, they are eternally to remain in it

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Calvinist. What meant the Savior, then, when he represented such only to be his sheep as hear his voice and follow him? And does not his promise that he gives unto them eternal life, and that they shall never perish, neither shall any pluck them out of his hand, imply on the face of it that he will not do the same for all the human race?

Author. It certainly implies that he does not do the same for all, but not that he never will. It is granted that some are his people in a peculiar sense, and that others are not so at the present time; but if we affirm that the same shall to all eternity be the

case, we must set a large part of the bible at nought. Jesus himself says, "And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd." (John x. 16.) Even in our strayed condition we are spoken of as sheep of his flock, and he, as the shepherd, pursues in order to bring us back to the fold. "All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all." (Isa. liii. 6.) Who that has read, and attentively considered, the beautiful parable of the lost sheep, can doubt the benevolent perseverance of the shepherd in pursuing sinful and wandering man, until he has fully succeeded in the object of the pursuit? Truth is, that elect and reprobate are distinctions belong ing to time only, and not even to all of time; for, as before shown, the Jews, once highly favored, are now reprobate; the Gentiles, once reprobate, are now highly favored. Anon the Jews shall be gathered in with the fulness of the Gentiles, and all distinctions shall be lost forever; there shall then be neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free, but all shall be one in Christ Jesus. In the speech which James delivered in the apostolic council at Jerusalem, the doctrine of election and reprobation is presented in perfect harmony with these views. "Simeon hath declared how God at the first did visit the Gentiles, to take out of them a people for his name. [These were the elect; some taken out from the mass as subjects for gospel grace.] And to this agree the words of the prophets; as it is written, After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David which is fallen down; and I will build again the ruins thereof, and I will set it up; that the residue of men [those left, after some had been taken out] might seek after the Lord, and all the Gentiles, upon whom my name is called, saith the Lord, who doeth all these things." (Acts xv. 14-17.) We here have the rejected, the passed by, the reprobates, plainly brought in at last; and were it otherwise, the declarations that God is impartial, and that his ways are equal, would be without any meaning intelligible to mankind.

Calvinist. It is not partiality in the great Jehovah to damn one sinner according to, and save another contrary to, his deservings; in the one case he glorifies his justice, in the other his grace