I. God has chosen from eternity certain persons out of the human race, which in and with Adam fell into sin and has no more power to believe and Convert itself than a dead man to restore himself to life, in order to make them blessed through Christ; while He passes by the rest through His righteous judgment, and leaves them lying in their sins.

II.  Children of believing parents, as well as full-grown believers, are to be considered as elect so long as they with action do not prove the contrary.

III.  God in His election has not looked at the belief and the repentance of the elect; but, on the contrary, in His eternal and unchangeable design, has resolved to give to the elect faith and stedfastness, and thus to make them blessed.

IV.  He, to this end, in the first place, presented to them His only begotten Son, whose sufferings, although sufficient for the expiation of all men’s sins, nevertheless, according to God’s decree, serves alone to the reconciliation of the elect.

V. God causest he Gospel to be preached to them, making the same through the Holy Ghost, of strength upon their minds; so that they not merely obtain power to repent and to believe, but also actually and voluntarily do repent and believe.

VI.  Such elect, through the same power of the Holy Ghost through which they have once become repentant and believing, are kept in such wise that they indeed through weakness fall into heavy sins; but can never wholly and for always lose the true faith.

VII.  True believers from this, however, draw no reason for fleshly quiet, it being impossible that they who through a true faith were planted in Christ should bring forth no fruits of thankfulness; the promises of God’s help and the warnings of Scripture tending to make their salvation work in them in fear and trembling, and to cause them more earnestly to desire help from that spirit without which they can do nothing.

There shall be no more setting forth of these subtle and finely wrought abstractions in our pages.  We aspire not to the lofty heights of theological and supernatural contemplation, where the atmosphere becomes too rarefied for ordinary constitutions.  Rather we attempt an objective and level survey of remarkable phenomena manifesting themselves on the earth; direct or secondary emanations from those distant spheres.

For in those days, and in that land especially, theology and politics were one.  It may be questioned at least whether this practical fusion of elements, which may with more safety to the Commonwealth be kept separate, did not tend quite as much to lower and contaminate the religious sentiments as to elevate the political idea.  To mix habitually the solemn phraseology which men love to reserve for their highest and most sacred needs with the familiar slang of politics and trade seems to our generation not a very desirable proceeding.

The aroma of doubly distilled and highly sublimated dogma is more difficult to catch than to comprehend the broader and more practical distinctions of every-day party strife.