Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/35

Rh children, the Confession minimizes or fails to give due recognition to His unspeakable love for all His reasonable creatures. He is the God of love: "Most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (II., i.). Moved by this love He has voluntarily condescended to covenant with men as men, with a view to their fruition of Him as their blessedness and reward (VII., i.); and when men had spurned this offered favor, He was pleased to make a second covenant, "wherein he freely offered unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him, that they may be saved" (VII., iii.)—an assertion of the universal sincere offer of salvation in Christ which is not taken away, but rather established, by the immediately subsequent assertion that God has further taken care that it shall not in all cases remain without fruition. To overlook these and similar passages in the effort to represent the Confession as disregarding the proportion of faith is most seriously to misrepresent its teaching. As a matter of fact the Confession builds its whole fabric on God's love, and emphasizes His general love quite as strongly as the Scriptures themselves; although, like the Scriptures, it does not substitute a general benevolence for the whole round of Divine attributes, or deny His sovereignty or His justice in proclaiming His love.

3. The most remarkable objection which has been brought of late against the Confession, however, is directed against the statement of the doctrine of the "Decree of God" in the third chapter. In apparent forgetfulness of the ninth chapter of Romans and similar scriptures, it is said that this statement goes beyond Scripture; it is said that the