Jonathan Edwards, Freedom of Will, in Works, 2: 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 not-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 Bennett Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 250-252-“ A ruler may forbid treason; but his command does not oblige him to do all in his power tɔ 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."

(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 us so 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.

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: 327-366. 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, 120, 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."

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. 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.

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 those 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 fulfil." 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, Calvinism and Socinianism compared in their Practical Effects; Atwater, Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton Review, 1875: 73.

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, sec Bushnell, Sermon on Every Man's Life a Plan of God, in Sermons for the New Life; also Nehemiah Adams, Evenings with the Doctrines, 243; Spurgeon's Sermon on Ps. 44: 3-"Because thou hadst a favor unto them.'

CHAPTER IV.

THE WORKS OF GOD; OR THE EXECUTION OF THE DECREES.

SECTION I.-CREATION.

I. DEFINITION OF CREATION.

By creation we mean that free act of the triune God by which in the beginning for his own glory he made, without the use of preexisting materials, the whole visible and invisible universe.

Quenstedt divides the works of God into three classes: (1) works of power, as creation, and preservation; (2) works of compassion, as redemption, calling, regeneration; (3) works of justice, as resurrection and final judgment.

In explanation we notice :

(a) Creation is not "production out of nothing," as if "nothing" were a substance out of which "something" could be formed.

We do not regard the doctrine of creation as bound to the use of the phrase "creation out of nothing," and as standing or falling with it. The phrase is a philosophical one, for which we have no Scriptural warrant, and it is objectionable as intimating that "nothing can itself be an object of thought and a source of being. The germ of truth intended to be conveyed in it can better be expressed in the phrase "without use of preexisting materials."

(b) Creation is not a fashioning of preexisting materials, nor an emanation from the substance of Deity, but is a making of that to exist which once did not exist, either in form or substance.

There is nothing divine in creation but the origination of substance. Fashioning is competent to the creature also. Gassendi said to Descartes that God's creation, if he is the author of forms but not of substances, is only that of the tailor who clothes a man with his apparel.

(c) Creation is not an instinctive or necessary process of the divine nature, but is the free act of a rational will, put forth for a definite and sufficient end. Creation is different in kind from that eternal process of the divine nature in virtue of which we speak of generation and procession. The Son is begotten of the Father, and is of the same essence; the world is created without preëxisting material, is different from God, and is made by God. Begetting is a necessary act; creation is the act of God's free grace. Begetting is eternal, out of time; creation is in time, or with time.

(d) Creation is the act of the triune God, in the sense that all the persons of the Trinity, themselves uncreated, have a part in it-the Father as the originating, the Son as the mediating, the Spirit as the realizing cause.

The work of the Holy Spirit seems to be that of completing, bringing to perfection. On the definition of Creation, see Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1: 11.

II. PROOF OF THE DOCTRINE OF CREATION.

Creation is a truth of which mere science or reason cannot fully assure us. Physical science can observe and record changes, but it knows nothing of origins. Reason cannot absolutely disprove the eternity of matter. For proof of the doctrine of creation, therefore, we rely wholly upon Scripture. Scripture supplements science, and renders its explanation of the universe complete.

Drummond, in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World, claims that atoms, as manufactured articles," and the dissipation of energy, prove the creation of the visible from the invisible. See the same doctrine propounded in "The Unseen Universe." But Sir Charles Lyell tells us : "Geology is the autobiography of the earth-- but like all autobiographies, it does not go back to the beginning." Hopkins, Yale Lectures on the Scriptural View of Man: "There is nothing a priori against the eternity of matter." Wardlaw, Syst. Theol., 2: 65-"We cannot form any distinct conception of creation out of nothing. The very idea of it might never have occurred to the mind of man, had it not been traditionally handed down as part of the original revelation to the parents of the race."

Hartmann, the German philosopher, goes back to the original elements of the universe, and then says that science stands petrified before the question of their origin, as before a Medusa's head. But in the presence of problems, says Dorner, the duty of science is not petrifaction, but solution. This is peculiarly true, if science is, as Hartmann thinks, a complete explanation of the universe. Since science, by her own acknowledgment, furnishes no such explanation of the origin of things, the Scripture revelation with regard to creation meets a demand of human reason, by adding the one fact without which science must forever be devoid of the highest unity and rationality. For advocacy of the eternity of matter, see Martineau, Essays, 1: 157-169.

A. Genesis 1: 1-"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." To this it has been objected that the verb 7 does not necessarily denote production without the use of preexisting materials (see Gen. 1: 27 "God created man in his own image"; cf. 2: 7-"the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground"; also Ps. 51: 10-" create in me a clean heart").

"In the first two chapters of Genesis is used (1) of the creation of the universe (1:1); (2) of the creation of the great sea monsters (1:21); (3) of the creation of man (1:27). Everywhere else we read of God's making, as from an already created substance, the firmament (1:7), the sun, moon, and stars (1:16), the brute creation (1:25); or of his forming the beasts of the field out of the ground (2:19); or, lastly, of his building up into a woman the rib he had taken from man (2:22, margin )”—quoted from Bible Com., 1: 31. Guyot, Creation, 30-"Bara is thus reserved for marking the first introduction of each of the three great spheres of existence-the world of matter, the world of life, and the spiritual world represented by man."

But we reply:

"does not necessarily or

(a) While we acknowledge that the verb invariably denote production without the use of preexisting materials, we still maintain that it signifies the production of an effect for which no natural antecedent existed before, and which can be only the result of divine agency." For this reason, in the Kal species it is used only of God, and is never accompanied by an accusative denoting material.

No accusative denoting material follows bara, in the passages indicated, for the reason that all thought of material was absent. See Dillmann, Genesis, 18; Oehler, Theol. O. T., 1: 177. The quotation in the text above is from Green, Hebrew Chrestomathy, 67.