Be this as it may, the foreknowledge and the decree were both eternal.  Here now it is a clear point that the moral actions of all accountable agents were, with certainty, fore-known, and their doom unalterably fixed, long before any one of them existed.

Strange that so great a man as Skelton should first affirm eternity of both, yet in the next sentence talk of “long before.”  These Reflections [5] are excellent, but here Skelton offends against his own canons.  I should feel no reluctance, moral or speculative, in accepting the apparent necessity of both propositions, as a sufficient reason for believing both; and the transcendancy of the subject as a sufficient solution of their apparent incompatibility.  But yet I think that another view of the subject, not less congruous with universal reason and more agreeable to the light of reason in the human understanding, might be defended, without detracting from any perfection of the Divine Being.  Nay, I think that Skelton needed but one step more to have seen it.

Ib. p. 478.

‘In fine.’

To what purpose were these Reflections, taken as a whole, written?  I cannot answer.  To dissuade men from reasoning on a subject beyond our faculties?  Then why all this reasoning?

Vol.  IV. p. 28.  Deism Revealed.

  ‘Shepherd’.  Were you ever at Constantinople, Sir?

  ‘Dechaine’.  Never.

  ‘Shep.’  Yet I believe you have no more doubt there is such a city,
          than that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two
          right ones.

  ‘Temp.’  I am sure 1 have not.

  ‘Dech.’  Nor I; but what then?

  ‘Shep.’  Pray, Mr. Dechaine, did you see Julius Caesar assassinated in
          the Capitol?

  ‘Dech.’  A pretty question!  No indeed, Sir.

  ‘Shep.’  Have you any doubts about the truth of what is told us by the
          historians concerning that memorable transaction?

  ‘Dech.’  Not the least.

  ‘Shep.’  Pray, is it either self-evident or demonstrable to you, at
          this time and place, that there is any such city as
          Constantinople, or that there ever was such a man as Caesar?

  ‘Dech.’  By no means.

  ‘Shep.’  And you have all you know concerning the being of either the
          city, or the man, merely from the report of others, who had it
          from others, and so on, through many links of tradition?

  ‘Dech.’  I have.

  ‘Shep.’  You see then, that there are certain cases, in which the
          evidence of things not seen nor either sensibly or
          demonstrably perceived, can justly challenge so entire an
          assent, that he who should pretend to refuse it in the fullest
          measure of acquiescence, would be deservedly esteemed the most
          stupid or perverse of mankind.