Page:On the Revision of the Confession of Faith.djvu/38

30 men perish for their sins; and that those who are thus left to perish are passed by not because they are worse than others, but in the sovereignty of God" (Dr. C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, II., 652; cf. pp. 712, 720, 723, sq.).

Is the Westminster Confession singular, then, in the place that is given to the statement of this deep mystery in the ordering of the matter of the Confession? By no means—both the Irish Articles and the Formula Consensus Helvetica give it precisely the same place—the place given it, moreover, by the great body of systematic theologians; as, for instance, to mention only a few names—Turrettine, Amesius, Marck, De Moore, Mastricht, Maccovius, Maresius, Burmann, and John Milton and John Norton among the oldest; Dick, Ridgley, John Brown, John Gill, Dwight, in the last age; and in our own day, A. A. Hodge, Dabney, Strong, Hovey, Patton, Shedd, Yan Oosterzee, and even the Lutherans, Luthardt and Weidner! No one of them likely to be charged with supralapsarianism! The fact of the matter is, this is the proper logical order in which to treat of the Decree of God, under which general head Predestination and Reprobation fall; and every Confession which treats the Decree of God in general, treats of it here, and with the one exception of the Shorter Catechism, they all treat of Predestination and Reprobation in immediate subordination to this caption. The Shorter Catechism (like the theologian Pictet) illustrates another possible distribution of the matter, viz., to treat of God's decree in general here and to postpone the treatment of the special decree which relates to human destiny until the doctrine of salvation is taken up. And this variation is only a question of convenience of treatment, without dogmatic significance one way or the other. To erect this mere matter of preferred order of statement into a substantial difference between the Confession and the