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.
After such admissions, no other possible defence can be made for
Calvinism or any other 'ism' than the wretched recrimination: "Why,
yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!"--Yea, and no wonder:--for in
essentials both are the same. But there was no reason for Fuller's
meddling with the subject at all,--metaphysically, I mean.
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