The Quakers believe again, that the Apostle Paul never included salvation in the words “called or chosen,” for another reason.  For if these words had implied salvation, then non-election might have implied the destruction annexed to it by the favourers of the doctrine of reprobation.  But no person, who knows whom the Apostle meant, when he mentions those who had received and those who had lost the preference, entertains any such notion or idea.  For who believes that because Isaac is said to have had the preference of Ishmael, and Jacob of Esau, that therefore Ishmael and Esau, who were quite as great princes in their times as Isaac and Jacob, were to be doomed to eternal misery?  Who believes that this preference, and the Apostle alludes to no other, ever related to the salvation of souls?  Or rather, that it did not wholly relate to the circumstance, that the descendants of Isaac and Jacob were to preserve the church of God in the midst of the Heathen nations, and that the Messiah was to come from their own line, instead of that of their elder brethren.  Rejection or reprobation too, in the sense in which it is generally used by the advocates for the doctrine, is contrary, in a second point of view, in the opinion of the Quakers, to the sense of the comparison or simile made by the Apostle on this occasion.  For when a Potter makes two sorts of vessels, or such as are mean and such as are fine and splendid, he makes them for their respective uses.  But he never makes the meaner sort for the purpose of dashing them to pieces.

The doctrine therefore in dispute, if viewed as a doctrine of general import, only means, in the opinion of the Quakers, that the Almighty has a right to dispose of his spiritual favours as he pleases, and that he has given accordingly different measures of his spirit to different people:  but that, in doing this, he does not exclude others from an opportunity of salvation or a right to life.  On the other hand, they believe that he is no respecter of persons, only as far as obedience is concerned:  that election neither secures of itself good behaviour, nor protects from punishment:  that every man who standeth, must take heed lest he fall:  that no man can boast of his election, so as to look down with contempt upon his meaner brethren:  and that there is no other foundation for an expectation of the continuance of divine favour than a religions life.

In viewing the passages in question as of private import, which is the next view the Quakers take of them, the same lesson, and no other, is inculcated.  The Apostle, in the ninth chapter of the Romans, addresses himself to the Jews, who had been a chosen people, and rescues the character of God from the imputation of injustice, in having passed over them, and in having admitted the Gentiles to a participation of his favours.

The Jews had depended so much upon their privileges as the children of Abraham, and so much upon their ceremonial observances of the law, that they conceived themselves to have a right to continue to be the peculiar people of God.  The Apostle, however, teaches them, in the ninth and the eleventh chapters of the Romans, a different lesson, and may be said to address them in the following manner:—­