FOREKNOWLEDGE.

It might at first appear fair to say, that the reconciliation of foreknowledge with free agency is the difficulty of our theology. Yet there seems to be a great difference, of which a theology ought to avail itself, between the admission of simple foreknowledge and the additional admission of predestination. If the term predestination has any proper significance, it implies a strict causative relation between the long past predestinating act and the predestined event. If it becomes anything less than this, it becomes simply prerecognition, with non-prevention in view of some collateral good; which is, properly speaking, foreknowledge. The true distinction, in fact, between foreknowledge and predestination is, that the former simply cognizes the act which another cause will put forth, while the latter causatively determines its putting forth, purposely excluding, by necessitative limitation, any other act instead. God may be supposed to foresee the act because the agent will put it forth; but God cannot properly be said to predestinate the action because the agent will put it forth; on the other hand, the agent must perform the act because it is predestinated. The act of the agent cannot properly be free, because it is antecedently limited and determined.

Our views of the reconcilement of foreknowledge with free-agency may, in brief, be represented in the following paragraphs:

1. The utmost doctrine of free-will does not require us to deny that there is some one way, and no other, in which all free volitions will be put forth. The infinite number of free volitions, singly and collectively, while put forth with full power otherwise, will be put forth in some one way, and no other. We have, then, only to affirm that, some how or other, we know not how, this one infinite series of volitions, put forth with full power otherwise, is perfectly foreknown by God. That is, the volitions are perfectly free, yet completely foreknown.

2. From this, it follows that it is perfectly just and true that an agent can do otherwise than the way that God knows

he will do; and yet it is not true that God can be deceived. The first is true; for if the foreknown act be that one act put forth with full counter power, then, by the very supposition, there is full power to perform an act different from the one foreknown. The second is not true; for, by the very supposition, the act which will be put forth, whichever that is, is the one perfectly and truly foreknown. God's foreknowledge, then, is sure of verification.

3. Foreknowledge does not cause the free act to be unfree. In conception, we first posit the free act; namely, the act as free as if there were no foreknowledge, or as if there were no God. This conception is, in itself, perfectly possible. Then, for that intrinsically free act to be foreknown, does not cause it to be unfree, nor in any way affect its intrinsic nature. Foreknowledge is not the cause of the free act; properly speaking, the particularity of the free act is the cause of the particularity of the anterior knowledge.

4. Nor does foreknowledge prove the act to be unfree. For, by the very supposition, the act put forth with diverse power, is the act foreknown. How the Deity came in possession of that power, we are, indeed, neither able nor bound to say; no more than we are bound to say how God came in possession of his self-existence.

To the Edwardean argument, that the fixedness of the eternally past effect, namely, foreknowledge, proves the necessitative character of the cause, namely, the act, we have our reply. That cause is, for instance, now transpir ing, a free volition, put forth with free counter power. That act, as cause, reflects its effectuation into the anterior eternity, and into God's eternal foreknowledge, there reproducing, in idea, just its own actual nature. The fixedness or immutability of that foreknowledge proves nothing; for the very supposition is that God's knowledge has the right act in possession (namely, the act which will, in full possession of power for other act, be truly put forth), and no other. But if the right act be in the divine eternal anterior knowledge, what need of any change or mutability? If it has the right act, that foreknowledge is bound to be

fixed and unchanging in its rightness. But, as before shown, this makes no difference in the intrinsic nature of the act.

DOCTRINE OF SIN AND GUILT.

Sin is, according to John, anomia, or disconformity to the law; and the term, therefore, though primarily applicable to actual trangression, is nevertheless used, both in theology and scripture, to designate a moral state or condition of being. Should, however, a being be placed in such a state otherwise than by his own free act, with full power of acting otherwise, for such a state we hold that he could not be strictly responsible, or, with absolute justice, punishable. In such a being there would be evil, moral evil, sin, but not responsibility, or desert of penalty. Should such a state of being be brought about by the agent's own free act, the responsibility would, we think, exist in full force; or, should the free being in such a state, possessed of full power to act otherwise, nevertheless sanction and appropriate to himself his depraved condition, making it the controlling power of his life, he thereby contracts the responsibility. Such a depraved state, in our view, has never been produced in any being by God, but always by free secondary agents. All responsible sin, therefore, whether of action or condition, arises from the action of free finite beings, in disconformity to the law, and in abuse of their free agency.

Sin, therefore, being produced, not by the infinite, but by the finite agent, can claim, in our view, no origination, ratification, or sanction from God. He neither willed it, ordained it, determined it, ordered it, located it, nor approvingly permitted it. He chose, indeed, that system of his own actions into which he knew that others would obtrude sin. The free agency by which it is produced, is itself, as a quality created by him, sublimely excellent; and is so created on account of its superior excellency and vast superiority over a system of inanimate beings or necessitated agents. But as a system of free agents would be superior to a system of necessitated agents, so the system of free agents

who would freely choose to be perfectly holy, would, we hold, doubtless be superior to a system of sinful free agents. Sin, therefore, actual and real, can be considered as no benefit to the government of God. It is evil in nature and evil in effect. Nor does God need sin in order to the production of the highest and best results. Where the sin will, however, be freely committed, God does place sequences of particular good, which would not take place but for that antecedent sin; although without the sin he might secure some still higher good. He often makes a particular good the sequent of a particular sin, which, did not that sin exist, would be by him effectuated from some other antecedent. In the present system, also, a particular sin, as, for instance, the sin of Adam, may be the condition absolutely requisite to the possibility of a particular highest good in the now existing system; which highest good may be the most exalted theme of angelic anthems; yet all this does not preclude the fact, that, were there no sin in the universe, a still more glorious, as well as a more happy, condition of things might exist.

The act of the will, put forth with full power otherwise, in intentional disconformity to the law, is actual or actional sin. The resultant ethical quality of condemnability, which our moral sense sees as inhering in the personality of the agent in consequence of the commission of such sin, we call guilt. And as the moral sense can see this guilt solely in the personality of the committing agent, it is impossible for this guilt to be transferred to another personality. Correlative to this guilt, the moral sense sees inhering in the person of the guilty a desert of just punishment. These correlations are fundamental and axiomatic. Punishment, therefore, is no more transferable, literally, than guilt. Neither is any more transferable than is a past act personally performed by one agent transferable to another agent. When, therefore, an innocent man is said to suffer in the stead of a guilty man, it is only in figurative conception that the guilt and punishment of the guilty are attributed or imputed to the innocent man; the literal fact is, that the

innocent man is still innocent, and the endurance by the innocent is simply suffering, but not literally, to him, punishment.

THE FALL AND DEPRAVATION OF MAN.

In the primordial man, Adam, as in every primordial progenitor, a whole posterity is conceptually enfolded. As in the acorn is enclosed, not only the oak, but a whole descending lineage of oaks, so in our first parent was enclosed a whole system of diverging lineages embracing a race. As his primordial nature shall stand higher or lower, so shall the deduced nature of that race be higher or lower. Under this fundamental law, extended through the whole generative system of creation, and based upon reasons of the highest wisdom, man, with his fellow races, animal and vegetable, is placed on earth. That law, that self-limiting law, God cannot wisely change. Upon the first man he bestows a nature of transcendental excellence, yet with a free and plastic power of self-degradation by sin. As man stands or falls, he stands or falls in his typical character; and his whole race, under the universal lineal law, must bear the same physical, intellectual, and moral type. And with this natural law corresponds the theodicic arrangement. Under the same moral and judicial conditions in which man places himself, must, as we believe, his posterity, if born, be born.

Historically, man, by sin, places himself under conditions. of depravation, including the threefold death — corporeal, moral, eternal.

The individual, Adam, is shut off from the tree of life; and is thus, perhaps, left to a natural mortality, through the decay and disintegration of his physical system. His sin has excluded the Holy Spirit; and thus the love of God can no longer be a motive of action, and the main source of spiritual light and knowledge is lost, and the vacillating will is so weakened, that it no longer firmly holds to the right. This state of things is not caused by the act of the infinite will, but is the result produced by the lawless action of the VOL. XIX. No. 74.

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