(says our man of sense,) “what may not be said of any one point, or any one moment, cannot be denied of the collective agency of a whole life, or any considerable section of it.  Here we find ourselves constrained by our best feelings to praise or condemn, to reward or punish, according as a great predominance of acts of obedience or disobedience, and a continued love of the better, or the lusting after the worst, manifests the maxim (’regula maxima’), the radical will and proper character of the individual.  So parents judge of their children; so schoolmasters of their scholars; so friends of friends, and even so will God judge his creatures, if we are to trust in our common sense, or believe the repeated declarations in the Old Testament.”  And now I should be glad to hear any satisfactory ‘sensible’ reply to this, or any answer that does not fly higher than ‘sense’ can follow, and pierce into “the thick clouds” of decried metaphysics!  For no fair reply can be imagined, but one which would find the root of the moral evil, the true [Greek:  ponaeron], in this very impossibility.

Ib. p. 249.

  ‘Cunningham.’  But how does all this discourse about sacrifices and the
                natural light show that your faith does not ascribe
                injustice to God in putting an innocent person to death
                for the transgressions of the guilty?

  ‘Shep.’  Was Christ innocent?

  ‘Cunn.’  ‘He was without sin.’

  ‘Shep.’  And he was put to death by the appointment and
          predetermination of God?

  ‘Cunn.’  The Jews put him to death.

  ‘Shep.’  Do not evade the question.  Was he not ’the Lamb slain from the
          foundation of the world’?  Was he not ’so delivered by the
          determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, that the Jews,
          having taken him, by wicked hands crucified and slew him?’

  ‘Cunn’.  And what then?

  ‘Shep’.  Nothing; but that you are to answer, as well as I, for saying
          that God predetermined the death of this only innocent person.

I am less pleased with this volume than with any of the preceding.  Ask your own heart and conscience whether (for instance,) they are satisfied with this defence ‘duri per durius’:  or whether frightening a modest query into silence by perverting it into an accusation of the Almighty, by virtue of a conclusion borrowed from the Calvinistic theory of Predestination, is not more in the spirit of Job’s comforters, than becomes a minister of the Apostolic Church of England and Ireland?  Such arguments are but edge-tools at the safest, but more often they may rather be likened to the two-edged blade of Parysatis’s knife, the one of which was poisoned.  Leave them to Calvin, or those who dare appropriate Calvin’s words, that “God’s absolute will is the only rule of his justice;”—­thus dividing the divine attributes.  Yet Calvin himself distinguishes the hidden from the revealed God, even as the Greek Fathers distinguished the [Greek:  thelaema Theou], the absolute ground of all being, from the [Greek:  Boulae tou Theou], as the cause and disposing providence of all existence.