And
to say that an all-knowing and all-powerful being is not responsible for
what happens, because he only permits it, is, under its intellectual
aspect, a piece of childish sophistry; while, as to the moral look of
it, one has only to ask any decently honourable man, whether, under like
circumstances, he would try to get rid of his responsibility by such a
plea.
Hume's _Inquiry_ appeared in 1748. He does not refer to Anthony Collins'
essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same
question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and
lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two
freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such
theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic
divine, Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey,
produced, in the interests of the straitest orthodoxy, a demonstration
of the necessarian thesis, which has never been equalled in power, and
certainly has never been refuted.
In the ninth section of the fourth part of Edwards' _Inquiry_, he has to
deal with the Arminian objection to the Calvinistic doctrine that "it
makes God the author of sin"; and it is curious to watch the struggle
between the theological controversialist, striving to ward off an
admission which he knows will be employed to damage his side, and the
acute logician, conscious that, in some shape or other, the admission
must be made.
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