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.
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