First, that all punishments are designed for the good of the whole,
  and less or corrective punishments for the good of the offender, is
  admitted. * * God never inflicts punishment for the sake of punishing.

This is not, [Greek:  hos emoige dokei], sufficiently guarded.  That all punishments work for the good of the whole, and that the good of the whole is included in God’s design, I admit:  but that this is the sole cause, and the sole justification of divine punishment, I cannot, I dare not, concede;—­because I should thus deny the essential evil of guilt, and its inherent incompatibility with the presence of a Being of infinite holiness.  Now, exclusion from God implies the sum and utmost of punishment; and this would follow from the very essence of guilt and holiness, independently of example, consequence, or circumstance.

Letter VI. p. 90.

  (The systems compared as to their tendency to promote morality in
  general.)

I have hitherto made no objection to, no remark on, any one part of this Letter; for I object to the whole—­not as Calvinism, but—­as what Calvin would have recoiled from.  How was it that so good and shrewd a man as Andrew Fuller should not have seen, that the difference between a Calvinist and a Priestleyan Materialist-Necessitarian consists in this:—­The former not only believes a will, but that it is equivalent to the ‘ego ipse’, to the actual self, in every moral agent; though he believes that in human nature it is an enslaved, because a corrupt, will.  In denying free will to the unregenerated he no more denies will, than in asserting the poor negroes in the West Indies to be slaves I deny them to be men.  Now the latter, the Priestleyan, uses the word will,—­not for any real, distinct, correspondent power, but,—­for the mere result and aggregate of fibres, motions, and sensations; in short, it is a mere generic term with him, just as when we say, the main current in a river.

Now by not adverting to this, and alas! misled by Jonathan Edwards’s book, Fuller has hidden from himself and his readers the damnable nature of the doctrine—­not of necessity (for that in its highest sense is identical with perfect freedom; they are definitions each of the other); but—­of extraneous compulsion.  O! even this is not adequate to the monstrosity of the thought.  A denial of all agency;—­or an assertion of a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts;—­this is the hybrid of Death and Sin, which throughout this letter is treated so amicably!  Another fearful mistake, and which is the ground of the former, lies in conceding to the Materialist, ‘explicite et implicite’, that the [Greek:  noumenon], the ‘intelligibile’, the ‘ipseitas super sensibilis’, of guilt is in time, and of time, and, consequently, a mechanism of cause and effect;—­in other words, in confounding the [Greek:  phainomena, ta rheonta, ta mae ontos onta],—­all which belong to time, and cannot be even thought of except as effects necessarily predetermined by the precedent causes, (themselves in their turn effects of other causes),—­with the transsensual ground or actual power.