not exhibited in the noisy declamations of popular meetings, but in the overflowings of a heart full of love to our fellow-men, and prompting to earnest prayer and efficient effort in their behalf.

ARTICLE V.

REVIEW OF FINNEY'S THEOLOGY.

By REV. GEORGE Duffield, D.D., Detroit, Michigan.

Lectures on Systematic Theology, embracing Lectures on Moral Government, Atonement, Moral and Physical Depravity, Regeneration, Philosophical Theories and Evidences of Regeneration. By REV. C. G. FINNEY, Professor of Theology, in the Oberlin Collegiate Institute.

(Concluded from p. 746, last volume.)

MORAL AND PHYSICAL DEPRAVITY,

THE main issue to be met on this point is very simple. Is there any tendency, bias, inclination, or disposition, call it what you please, whether simple or complex, negative or positive, which operates, with determining influence, as a cause or reason why men, uniformly and invariably, in all the appropriate circumstances of their nature, choose to do evil? Does the existence of such a causative influence determining to sin, imply a physical necessity and impair the freedom of the will appropriate to man as a moral agent? Our author, virtually, if not explicitly, denies the former and affirms the latter. Some, in affirming the former, may have erred in their illustrations, calling it taste or instinct, and comparing it with that which renders the serpent venomous, the tiger ferocious, the canine and feline tribe carnivorous, and the like; and they may have prosaically or poetically expressed themselves so as to be obnoxious to the charge of believing or teaching, that there flows a poisonous lues, from parent to child, or there exists a fever in the blood, or some physical entity, which is sinful per se. But to avoid an error in this extreme, must we run so far to the other as to deny all causative influence determining to sin, and insist that freedom of will consists alone in absolute sovereignty and independence? Our author says explicitly, "Moral depravity is sin itself, and not the cause of sin;" nor, of course, a cause of sin; which is in effect to resolve all moral depravity into acts of will, and rebuke the common sense notions of mankind, who distinguish between a state of the affections and passions affecting the will, and the acts of the will, and predicate moral depravity of both in given cases. Dr. Dwight will not

give a name to that specific particular state of the affections, &c., which determines the will to sin-which, in other words, renders it pleasant and agreeable to sin, which finds enjoyment in this and the other thing God forbids, and is pained and affected with aversion by that which He requires. But that such a state exists, and is culpable, men almost universally assume; and they generally estimate the degree of a man's moral depravity, by the degree of satisfaction experienced in doing wrong, and of aversion to doing what is right. In estimating moral depravity, we must not confine our attention to the volition, choice, purpose, or ultimate intention merely; but embrace also the feeling of pleasure or satisfaction had in doing wrong, and of pain or aversion to do what is right. We think, speak, and judge of it as the working of a mind, will, and heart, or affections and passions averse from God, and unaffected by His love, or regard for Him-which finds its satisfaction in opposing His will, and not in doing it. So the Scriptures describe it, and call it "enmity against God," which from the very first is morally certain to manifest itself in all the

race.

Our author may say that this is but what he means by selfishness, or that it means nothing more. We are willing, for the sake of argument, to admit it. But in analyzing that selfishness, in resolving it into its constituent elements, we differ widely from him, and believe, that to describe it as consisting wholly in generic purpose, ultimate intention and choice, operating in successive executive volitions, will not tell all the truth, nor will it help the matter to make self-gratification the end on which choice terminates. For the question comes back, and must be met and satisfactorily answered by our author, before he is done with his analysis of moral depravity, why do men, universally and invariably, from the very first, find their pleasure in gratifying self, and not in doing the will of God, in pleasing self rather than in pleasing God? What is it, in other words, that uniformly from the first, makes man choose self-gratification as the ultimate end, instead of "the good of God and the universe?" We answer, that such is the condition in which we are born into this world, such the derangement of our moral powers, and the original moral constitution of the race produced by the sin and apostasy of our first parents, that selfishness is natural to man. It ensues by virtue of our connection with, and descent from, a guilty progenitor, that under whatever circumstances we may be born, in all the appropriate conditions of our being, sin will be preferred to holiness-man will find it more natural and agreeable to serve himself than to serve God. And of man thus related, affected, and conditioned, we predicate moral depravity.

Our author ascribes the uniformity and universality of sinful choice, “to the influence of temptation, or to a physically-depraved THIRD SERIES, VOL. V., NO. 1.

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constitution, surrounded by the circumstances in which mankind first form their moral character, or put forth their first moral choices." Whatever he may say to the contrary, he thus, in reality, admits that some causes operate to determine the will to sinful choice, and that they are permanent, uniform, and efficient to secure the total depravity of the race. For he says, "We can also predict that with a constitution physically depraved, and surrounded with objects to awaken appetite, and with all the circumstances in which human beings first form their moral character, they will seek to gratify themselves universally unless prevented by the Holy Spirit." His predictions rest on fixed operative causes, according to this showing. Of course, therefore, his freewill, after all, is not absolutely sovereign and independent; but is influenced, affected, and determined by antecedent thoughts or feelings. Some causative influence is operative; and whether it be physical depravity, temptation, circumstances, or what not, or all together, we care not. His philosophy fails him, and he gains nothing, nor approximates one step nearer than we do to a solution of the fact of the universal depravity of the human race, which, we frankly confess, is like many other phenomena in the moral government of God, totally inexplicable by human reason. Why have these things operated so uniformly for near six thousand years, so that there is not a solitary exception in the developments of Adam's race, except the babe of Bethlehem, miraculously conceived, but they have all together become corrupt, there is none that doeth good, not one." If the will possesses that sort of self-originating, self-determining power, that, of its own simple unaided sovereignty, it acts, and this is the freedom he claims for it, then why are there not some found who from the first are wholly uncontaminated by sin? Let him answer this consistently with his philosophy. If physical depravity, together with temptation and outward circumstances, operate uniformly to render men sinners, then may he be truly charged, equally with those he condemns, with teaching that man sins by a law of physical necessity. "His "philosophy of free will," in contradistinction to that of a necessitated will, relieves him not. We will not suffer him to escape in the fog of his metaphysics, but demand of him that he tell us, in terms which cannot be misunderstood, what he means by the freedom of the will. The exceeding obscurity and defectiveness of his definition, we pointed out in our first article, when examining simply the claims of what he calls a superior philosophy. The freedom of the will has long been a subject of theological as well as a metaphysical discussion, and our author has produced nothing new, but rather revived the old Armenian philosophy, which Edwards and Owen before him so effectually exposed. He must be much more explicit and tell us precisely in what it consists, and not play fast

'II. 460.

and loose between the Calvinistic and Armenian schemes, if he would have us respect the consistency and honesty of his teach ings. To claim to be a Calvinist and appear in Arminian dress, to profess to hold substantially to the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, as he has very recently done, and yet ridicule and abuse it and its framers, does not well agree with our ideas of consistency or morality. But we judge him not. If the freedom of the will, in his judgment, be the absolute unqualified power of its self-determination-unaffected, uninfluenced, uncaused by anything whatever antecedent in the mind-the liberty of indifference -let him speak it out openly and manly, that we may place him with the school to which he seems to belong, and cease to discourse to us about motive or end, or any other reason for willing than the will's own sovereign independent determination or choice. Universal consciousness will oppose effectual barriers against such a philosophy. The veriest child will rebuke our philosopher. By self-determination, therefore, he must mean something different from absolute independent self-originated acts of will-the liberty of indifference, or of contingency. Honesty requires that on this point he define his position.

"If the freedom of the will," says Dr. Dwight, "is the freedom of contingency, then plainly its volitions are all accidents, and certainly the chances, arithmetically considered, are as numerous in favor of virtuous volitions as of sinful ones. There ought, therefore, on this plan, to be, and ever to have been, as many absolutely virtuous persons in the world as sinful. Plainly all ought not to be sinful. If the freedom of the will is the freedom of indifference, the same consequence ought to follow: for if there be no bias in the mind towards either virtue or sin, at the time immediately preceding each of its volitions, and the freedom of each volition arises out of this fact, then, certainly, there being no bias either way, the number of virtuous, and of sinful volitions, must naturally be equal, and no cause can be assigned why every man, independently of his renovation by the Spirit of God, should be sinful only. If the liberty of the will consist in self-determination, and the mind, without the influence of any motive, first wills that it will form a second volition, and this volition depends for its freedom on the existence of such a preceding one; then it is plain, that from these preceding volitions as many virtuous as sinful ones ought to be derived; because the preceding or self-determining volitions, are, by the supposition, under no influence or bias from any cause whatever. Thus it is evident, that, according to all these suppositions, there could be no preponderancy, much less an universality, of sin in the world.".

This learned and sober theologian has well observed, in addition to the above, that the liberty of the will and consequently the moral 'Dwight's Theology, I. 485.

agency of man in this world, is the same in kind with that of the spirits of just men made perfect in heaven, of the holy angels, and of the man Christ Jesus. Whence then comes it to pass that the same moral agency in heaven is developed universally and invariably in holiness, but on earth in sin? Our author is bound to answer this, consistently with his philosophy of the freedom of the will. We say, with the Bible for our guide, that the moral depravity of man results inevitably and naturally from the fall of our first parents; that causes then were brought into action which gave such a bias to sin that it can only be counteracted and overcome by the atonement of Jesus Christ, and the regenerating and sanctifying influence of the Holy Spirit. It is not in man, ruined and depraved by nature, to reform and purify himself, and to perfect holiness without the Spirit of God.

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With this subject our author's views of ability and inability, are intimately connected. They also are shaped by his philosophy. The distinctions made by Dr. Twisse, prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly of divines, by Phillip Henry, and President Edwards, and all the chief theologians of New England, between moral and natural ability and inability, he rejects and ridicules, and insists that liberty is ability or power, and power or ability is liberty. Natural ability, and natural liberty to will, must be identical," says our author. "If he (man) has power by nature to will directly as God requires, or by willing to avail himself of power so to will, he is naturally free and able to obey the commandments of God. Then let it be borne distinctly in mind, that natural ability, about which so much has been said, is nothing more nor less than the freedom or liberty of the will, of a moral agent. No man knows what he says, or whereof he affirms, who holds to the one and denies the other, for they are truly and properly identical."

The reader will notice the modesty here betrayed in thus, by his definition, confounding things that differ, and dogmatically pouring contempt on some of the profoundest thinkers, and most erudite writers who, on a subject confessedly complicated, and of difficult apprehension, have both used and carefully explained the import of terms long current in theology. Our author has not defined so well wherein consists the freedom of the will, nor rendered his subject so clear as to carry with it the proof of his accuracy and truth in the premises, and authorize him to stultify those, who, with the Shorter Catechism, affirm, that "no mere man is able in this life perfectly to keep the commandments of God," and yet teach, with the Westminster Confession, that "God hath endowed the will of man with that natural liberty that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil.””

The words, power or ability, and liberty or freedom, are not synonymous; neither are the things they represent identical. 1 III. 16, 17. * Con. of Faith, chap. ix. : 1.