Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: accordance with the eternal counsels and decretive will of God. Such an authorship of an economy of wrong, and such a patronage of it, would vitiate the divine relations to it, ?would annihilate the character of God, and sap the foundations of virtue. DIRECT DISCUSSION?GENERAL STATEMENT. I arrest at this point the consideration of the list of errors which lie most integrally in the way of an appropriate and adequate comprehension of our subject. If I have been successful in disengaging the truth from their mischievous adumbrations, our way is open and direct to the investigation of our subject on principles which are satisfactory to reason and the moral sense, and which are in accordance with the analogies of all truth, both in its philosophical idea and in its concrete and historic expression. Let but these anomalous positions be revised, and adjusted to the terms of a legitimate and much-needed philosophy, and the problem before us is easily solved and within the sphere of humanity. Little more is needful than to follow out the leadings of the providence and Word of God in their concurrent and uniform testimony, in coincidence with the first truths of reason and the moral sense. A valid and satisfactory theology will crystallize around the simple facts and statements of the case. These will show God's relations to sin, and justify them to all principles of honor and right, ?that those relations are unique, and characteristic, and antagonistic to sin, and in the line of virtue, ?-that sin is not a divine method or expedient, ?that in its inception, progress and fruits, it is not of God, ? that as a method and a fact it exists solely in the finite, and through apostasy, and against the will of God, and that God holds Himself, or may be justly held, no way responsible for