Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 1.djvu/371

 THE PULPIT IN N. H. DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY.

��363

��grims to the celestial city tarried to re- ceive instruction and confirmation. For more than two centuries, men who have been arraigned for heresy have been tried by creeds formulated by uninspired men, instead of the Scriptures. The Augs- burg Confession, the Institues of Calvin, the Thirty-nine Articles, the Assembly's Confession of Faith, and, later, Wesley's Commentaries, have been the tests of de- nominational faith. Every ecclesiastical court in Christendom could carry on their persecutions by appeals to their creeds, if the Bible were annihilated. All sects are the followers of some lead- er and interpreter. They adopt the views of Arius and Pelagius, of Athanasius and Augustine, of Duns Scotus or Aquinas, of Calvin or Arminius, of Hopkins or Wesley. The text of Scripture, quoted by each disciple, is colored by the medi- um through which it has passed. Tem- perament often has more to do with creeds than exegesis.

I have heard sermons on election and reprobation preached to audiences where three-fourths of the hearers were classed as reprobates ; and they went away be- lieving that they could do nothing to avert their doom. I have heard the un- limited offer of salvation proclaimed by men who believed that only a limited number were elected to eternal life, and justified by this illustration: u IfI am the owner of only one dollar in the world, and I know, assuredly, that only one in the crowd that stands before me would accept it, I may safely say ; who- soever, in this multitude, will come to me and ask for a dollar shall receive it." After listening to a sermon on the hard- ening of Pharaoh's heart, I have heard men ask how the hardened sinner was to be blamed. After hearing the sovereign- ty of God proved from this text: "Ja- cob have I loved ; Esau have I hated," and that too before the children were born, I have heard the inquiry, "Is the government of God reasonable?" One text ought not to be so overtasked.

President Edwards writes one hundred and thirty pages on " Justification by Faith," and he adds not one iota to the declaration made in his text. His ampli- fication of it makes the doctrine more

��obscure. In another place, he writes sev- enty pages more of " Observations con- cerning faith." under eighty-eight differ- ent heads, with nearly as many subordi- nate divisions and inquiries. In these observations, he assigns to faith as nec- essary to its existence, everything good that a believer can do, feel, think, enjoy or suffer, in his pilgrimage to Heaven. Faith absorbs the whole activity of the Christian's life. In his treatise on re- ligious affections he is equally minute. He discusses every emotion of hope, fear, joy, trust, and submission that ever was cited as proof of godliness, and demon- strates that every one of these evidences, taken by itself alone, may prove false and delusive. With such commentaries, the gospel is a perfect puzzle. But some one may say, if these doctrines, hard to be understood, are revealed, notwith- standing the unlearned wrest them to their own destruction, shall they not be faithfully inculcated? But, " Who shall decide when doctors disagree?" Calvin- ists and Arminians, Hopkinsians and Methodists, Catholics and Protestants, all attempt to prove their doctrines from the Bible; and every clergyman of a hundred sects deems his own creed the only true one; I therefore adopt the ad- vice of a close-communion Baptist who, in urging me to unite with his church, said: " You must believe, not the creed that has some evidence of its truth, but that which has the most evidence." No man is shut up to the five points of Cal- vinism in his pulpit. The whole field of Christian duty, and the related topics of man's dependence, probation, responsi- bility, retribution and eternal life or death, "according to the deeds done in the body," invite discussion. The con- science is oftener reached by enforcing forties than by explaining dogmas. Arch- bishop Whately said of Calvinism: " Whatever abstract truth may be sup- posed to underlie necessarianism, which is its final term, men are always obliged, even when the warmest advocates of the theory, to disregard it in practice, and to act as if free will and contingency, not fatalism, were the laws which ride hu- man conduct." The following extract is from the New

�� �