Letters...to his brother...

Letter I

introduction.

It is my purpose to write for the press a series of plain letters addressed to you, of which this is the first. You are an Arminian, I am a Calvinist. We cannot both be right ; and as one or the other must be in the wrong, you will not think it strange that I assume the wrong to be on your side. I propose in these letters to point out the errors and inconsistencies of Arminianism ; but I trust that it is as far beneath my dignity to write in the style of abuse, as it could be beneath your dignity to read such a style with patience. The great denomination 2 (5)

6 INTRODUCTION.

to which you belong, we Presbyterians rejoice to recognize as one of the leading branches of the church of Christ, and I, for one, do not find it in my heart to treat her with abuse. We have between us a common Christianity, in whose defense we can stand side by side ; and shoulder to shoulder, we can press forward to the attack of the common foe. We have a common Saviour, who is precious alike to you and to us. As we ought not to be objects of fierce attack by you, you ought not to be objects of* fierce attack by us ; and you certainly shall not be by me.

We cannot, however, both be in the right. To us it is quite clear that your church, while she holds to the great essentials, ignores some important principles of religion. The gospel, which you and your brethren preach, is not, indeed, another gospel ; the elements of salvation are there, but, as it strikes us, these elements are strangely mixed and compounded with human devices and human errors. It has always seemed to us that the Christian warrior, clad in the panoply of Methodist- Arminianism, fights at manifest disadvantage. The armor appears scant and defective. Pardon me, brother, but either we have too much, or you have not

INTRODUCTION. 7

enough. The Arminian helmet of salvation may do for you, but it would hardly cover our defenseless heads. Your shield of faith may be sufficient for your purpose, but it is not large enough ; its texture is not firm enough to ward off all the fiery darts of our adversaries. The sword, which you wield, is doubtless the sword of the Spirit ; but the edge is too often turned and blunted by unfortunate strokes, against what you denominate the errors of Calvinism, but what are in reality the adamantine truths of God's eternal word. To point out these defects, to set forth the inconsistencies and contradictions in your system of theology, and to lead the reader from the Arminian form of Christianity to the purer and more perfect religion of the Bible, is the task I propose to myself in the composition of the following letters.

John Smith.

IRON AND CLAY.

Letter II

The doctrinal system of the Arminian Methodists often reminds me of the image which Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, saw in vision. While the head, the arms, the body, and the legs were each of solid metal, of gold and silver, and brass and iron, the feet and toes had this strange peculiarity, they were partly of iron and partly of potter's clay. The composition of those feet and toes strikes me as a capital representation of Arminianism, which has at once the iron strength of truth, and the crumbling incoherence of error. The great fundamental truths of the gospel are there. The fall of man, the Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ, His sacrificial offering, the regeneration of the sinner by the Holy Spirit, — these are all there. But, unfortunately, with every one of these great- scriptural truths are mingled errors more or less serious ; some of them quite specious, others quite absurd. Let me now, my brother, point out to you the proportions of the iron and the clay of which your theological

IRON AND CLAY. 9

system is made up. The standards of the Methodist Episcopal Church set forth the following doctrines : —

1st. God created man a free agent.

This is iron. 2d. Adam lost his free agency in the fall.

This is clay. 3d. Through grace free agency was restored to Adam.

Clay. 4th. Adam was constituted the federal head and representative of his posterity. Iron. 5th. The human race were involved in ruin by their federal head and representative, so that death temporal, spiritual, and eternal seized them all.

Iron. 6th. The human race could not in justice have been thus involved in ruin, had not God determined to send His Son into the world to counteract the evils of the apostacy. Clay. fth. After the fall, God, as a just Being, was under obligation to do one of two things : either to cut off the race at once in the person of 2*

10 IRON AND CLAY.

Adam, or to -provide a Saviour by way of compensation to the lost family of man. Miry clay. 8th. In the infinitude of His grace, God provided a Saviour, the second Adam, the Lord from Heaven, to redeem wretched sinners from the thraldom of sin and death. Solid iron. 9th. But if God had not sent His Son to redeem the world, the world could never have been called to account for transgression. Clay. 10th. Without grace sinners cannot repent and turn to God.

Iron. 11th. If God did not bestow grace, sinners would not be under obligation to repent and turn to God.

Clay. 12th. God has not the right to pass by any sinner of the human race. He has not the right to have mercy on whom He will have mercy, nor has He the right to harden whom He will harden.

Potter's clay.

Clay enough, surely ! The feet and toes of Nebuchadnezzar's image could hardly have had

LOSS OF FREE AGENCY. 11

a greater proportion of it. In the skillful hands, however, of your preachers and writers, the iron and the clay, gospel truth and human error, are so attempered ; the angular projections so neatly filed away, the ugly hollows and indentations so nicely filled up, that the mass comes forth a system smooth and rounded ; beautiful to look upon, but great care to be used in the handling. I propose to try a few strokes of the hammer on the several parts of this ingeniously constructed system, and should the soft clay separate and fly off from the hard metal, let the result be attributed rather to the unlucky combination of such discordant materials, than to the strength or skill of the arm that wields the implement.

John Smith.

Letter III

The Arminian scheme, I said, is a mixture of truth and error, of gospel truth and human 'error. Christ Jesus the true Foundation is indeed laid, but on that foundation is reared no

12 LOSS OF FREE AGENCT,

small amount of the wood, hay, and stubble of men's devices. Among these devices are two distinguished by their singularity: one, that free agency was lost by sin ; the other, that free agency was restored by grace. "We believe," say the Doctrinal Tracts, published by order of the General Conference, — "we believe," say all the preachers, elders, and bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church, — "we believe that in the moment Adam fell he had no freedom of will left." But why do you all believe so? Is it because the Bible says so ? Will you point to a single passage in the Old or New Testament where such a statement is made ? Or, if this is asking too much, will you at least name some passage from which such an inference even can with fairness be drawn? You know that you cannot. You know, my good brother, that we are all free agents, and that the sacred oracles set this forth in language very distinct and very clear. "Yes, we are all free agents," you reply; "but free agency was restored by grace. A measure of free will, say the Doctrinal Tracts, is supernaturally given to all men, and therefore all men are now responsible agents." This is odd enough. But where, it may be asked, do the' Scriptures teach that fallen man had freedom of

LOSS OF FREE AGENCY. 13

will restored to him by grace ? In the same book, chapter, and verse, I suppose, where it is stated that he lost it ! It would be a curious subject of inquiry, how long an interval there was between the loss and the restoration of the free agency of the first man — between the point at which he ceased to be responsible and the point where he again was clothed with responsibility. The Doctrinal Tracts, unfortunately, throw no light on this mystery. Let us, however, venture to suppose it to have been the period that elapsed from the instant of the fall to the cool of the evening, when the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden was heard calling to him, ''Where art thou?" During this space of time, then, the father of the human race could do no wrong, according to the Arminian theory, because he had no freedom of will left. To despise the glorious Creator, to shun His presence, to resist His mandates, involved no guilt! If Adam was finally saved, the acts of that hour needed no forgiveness; if he was finally lost, the sins of that hour could not be punished. True, he was originally endued with all the faculties requisite to secure accountability, but that accountability ceased at the moment that the first act of sin was perpe-

14 ADAM WITHOUT GRACE.

trated. After the first transgression he was no longer a responsible agent. To be amenable at the bar of his Judge, he must have an adequate supply of grace, and that supply the Judge himself was in duty bound to furnish. Until that gift, the gift of grace, was bestowed, the new-born rebel might have it all his own way. There was no law in the statute book of Heaven to reach him. If grace had been withheld for a whole year, then the acts of that whole year would have been irresponsible acts. If grace had been kept back a thousand years, the high crimes and misdemeanors compressed into that vast period would in justice have passed unrebuked and unpunished. And if grace had never been conferred at all, the traitor would have been completely absolved from all obligation to love and obey his righteous Sovereign; through all the future it would have been his dreadful privilege to hate and blaspheme his Maker! His Maker could not have called him to an account, for the simple Arminian reason that, where no grace is given, the sinner cannot be taken in hand for his misdeeds. Here, then, we have two figments engrafted on the teachings of God's holy word — the loss of man's free agency by sin, and the restoration of free agency by

BISHOP HEDDING. 15

grace. The whole circle of theological errors does Dot furnish two instances of purer fiction. Such, however, is the ingenuity with which these singular fictions have been dovetailed in the great system of Divine truth, that multitudes take it for granted that they do of right belong there.

Your late excellent Bishop Hedding, when a young man, once filled an appointment to preach in a Free-Will Baptist house of worship somewhere in New England — I think it was in New Hampshire. It was a custom among the members of that denomination, after preaching, to make an exhortation, or, as they called it, to "free their minds." When Mr. Hedding had finished his sermon, several of the members rose, one after another, to their feet, to confirm the truth of what the minister had said to them. At length a brother, who was perfectly delighted with the discourse, took the floor, to free his mind also. After saying a great many handsome things about the sermon, wishing to pay the preacher a particularly agreeable compliment, he concluded by saying : "Brethren, you have heard the truth to-day, the whole truth, and more than the truth." When you Methodist Arminians teach that Adam was constituted the

16 FREE AGENCY NOT LOST.

federal head and representative of his posterity, you say the truth. When you further teach, as Mr. Watson does, that death — temporal, spiritual, and eternal — passed upon all men in consequence of the sin of the first man, you say the whole truth. But when, in addition to this, you maintain that free agency was lost in the fall, and afterward restored by grace, you travel out of the record — you say more than the truth.

John Smith.

LETTER IY.

You ask me to state our views of free agency. This is easily done. Adam was created a free agent, was a free agent when he fell, was a free agent after the fall, and will to all eternity be a free agent. Holiness does not communicate freedom to the will, and sin cannot destroy it. Gabriel is a free agent, but he is not more free than he would be were he an angel of darkness ; and the Devil is as truly a free agent now as when he was an angel of light. What is free-

FREE AGENCY NOT LOST. 17

dom of the will? What is free agency? The power to act according to one's choice; the power to do what one desires and aims to do. A holy angel loves God and obeys Him; he does this from choice, and is consequently a free agent. A fallen angel hates God and opposes Him ; he does this from choice, and he, also, is a free agent. It is just so with the race to which we belong ; some obey the Lord Jesus Christ and are saved, others refuse to obey Him and are lost. Both those who obey and those who do not obey, those who are saved and those who are lost, are alike responsible for their acts ; and they are alike responsible for their acts because they are equally free. The impenitent sinner, for example, persists in rejecting the great salvation, and in doing this, he simply follows the dictates of his will, he will not come to the Saviour. He will not be saved ; in nothing that he does is he more free than in this ; he could not be more free than he is, because he is already as free as it is possible for any creature to be; it is his deliberate choice to be what he is, an impenitent sinner. He is, it is true, the slave of sin, but he is a voluntary slave ; he is deeply in love with his ponderous fetters; he refuses to be emancipated, and rejects with scorn all offers of 3

18 FREE AGENCY NOT LOST.

deliverance ; arguments and appeals directed to the understanding and the conscience are thrown away; no promises of future happiness, no threatenings of future wrath, nothing short of Omnipotent power can shake his fixed purpose ; infatuated as he is, the sinner is in all this perfectly free.

These are our views on this subject, and we are sure that they are as strictly in accordance with the dictates of common sense as they are with the sacred teachings of the. Scriptures. To sum up the matter, you and we agree, and also disagree. We are agreed in this, that man is a free agent. But in this we differ: you believe that free agency was lost in the fall, we hold that it was not lost; you think that free agency was restored by grace, we maintain that as it could never be lost, it could not as a matter of course be restored.

John Smith.

ADAM AND HIS POSTERITY. 19

Letter V

The trial of our first parents was, according to the representations of Anninianism, virtually of the nature of a farce. It was all sham. Far be it from me to charge you or your brethren with regarding that great transaction in the light of a farce, or with actually believing that it was all a sham. To say this, would be to slander the denomination to which you belong. But the teachings of your system, brother, do certainly show up the whole matter in the light of a solemn farce. Now for the proof. Your standards maintain that the whole human race were put on trial in the person of Adam, their federal head and representative. "Adam," according to Richard Watson, the great expounder of Methodist Arminianism, "Adam is to be regarded as a public man, the head and representative of the human race, who, in consequence of his fall, have fallen with him." Again he says : " The circumstances of the case infallibly show that in the whole transaction they — Adam and Eve — stood before their Maker as public

20 ADAM AND HIS POSTERITY.

persons, and as the legal representatives of their descendants, though in so many words they are not invested with these titles." "The threatenings pronounced on the first pair," continues Mr. Watson, "have all respect to their posterity as well as to themselves. The death threatened affects all. In Adam all die ; death entered by sin, that is by his sin, and then passed upon all men." Nor does he explain this of natural death alone. "The opinion of those divines who include, in the penalty attached to the first offense, death, bodily, spiritual, and eternal, is not to* be puffed away by sarcasm, but stands firm on inspired testimony."* So far all is plain, and true as it is plain. But we are now, unhappily, about to enter the domain of fancy and of farce. You hold the doctrine that God, though He so placed mankind at the disposal of their head and chief that if he stood, they stood, if he fell, they fell, had not the right to leave them to the full consequences of the representation to which He had Himself subjected them. This is, it must be owned, singular enough, and has all the force of contradiction. Methodists accuse Universalists of representing Jehovah as

* Watson's Theological Institutes, part ii. chap, xviii.

ADAM AND HIS POSTERITY. 21

threatening sinners merely to alarm them, as employing the most fearful terms of warning and rebuke simply — for nothing. The accusation is just. But a similar accusation may be laid against the Methodists. They admit, indeed, that God threatened Adam's posterity as well as Adam himself; but it was a mere TJniversalist threat, it meant nothing. We, on the contrary, believe, not only like you, that death in its three terrific forms was denounced against our race, but we believe, what many of you do not believe, that the awful penalty was just. We stand abashed indeed, we feel our littleness, we are conscious of our deep ignorance, when we approach this mysterious, this incomprehensible transaction. But we are bold to claim, that God always does what is perfectly fair and right; and what we ourselves would see is perfectly right and fair, had we only understandings equal to the high task of comprehending His ways, had we only line enough to fathom the ocean of His perfections. With an unflinching front, therefore, we maintain that it would be in accordance with justice in the strictest sense, had the full penalty annexed to the first sin committed on our planet been carried into execution. For this we are assailed in no measured 3*

22 ADAM AND HIS POSTERITY.

terms, from ten thousand Arminian pulpits. The Rev. Dr. R. S. Foster, in a work entitled "Objections to Calvinism," printed at the Methodist Book Concern in Cincinnati, has resort to the following style of argumentation: "Sinners were born corrupt, and so cannot be guilty for this : they cannot escape from corruption, and so are not guilty for remaining in it." "His disability came with him into the world ; it was communicated as a part of his existence ; it was his very and essential nature ; and now, was he to blame for an existence and nature which were forced upon him, which never, at any period, he consented to, and which he never could avoid ? His first parent may be to blame, but surely he cannot be responsible ; for he not only did not bring his disability on himself, but it was imposed on him, without the possibility of its removal. Let him sin, no being in the universe can censure him, for he is not to blame."* Thus Dr. Foster openly takes sides with rebellion, and publicly proclaims to the universe that, had not the effects of Adam's sin been neutralized by the atonement of Christ, the sinner must go clear ;

* Objections to Calvinism, from the article, "Effectual Calling.*''

ILLUSTRATIONS. 23

while the whole blame of all the sins and crimes perpetrated from the creation of the world, would have to rest with God Himself; and the reverend doctor would have no scruples to tell his Maker so to His face. But if, as Mr. Watson declares, the threatenings pronounced on the first pair had all respect to their posterity, as well as to themselves, those threatenings must most certainly have been just, otherwise God, the Fountain of justice, could never have given utterance to them. If then the threatenings were just, it is clear that the penalty denounced must also have been just, and it is quite as clear that, if it had been unjust to let the penalty denounced take its natural course, the threat itself of the penalty would have been equally unjust. If, for example, it would be unjust in a human tribunal to confine an innocent man in the penitentiary, it would also be an act of gross wrong to sentence him to the penitentiary. If it is a sin to inflict the penalty of death on a person guilty of no crime, it must likewise be a sin to pronounce sentence of death on such a person. A judge of one of our criminal courts — we will suppose — sentences to the gallows a batch of unoffending creatures who he knows are innocent, who he well knows deserve not such a fate ; in

24 APPLICATION OP ARMINIAN THEORY.

full knowledge, however, of their freedom from all guilt, he solemnly proceeds to declare that, on such a day, between such and such hours, the terror-stricken wretches before him shall hang by the neck till they are dead. Would not everybody shrink from a farce so revolting ? Now you Arminians, my dear brother, are chargeable with placing the Supreme Judge of the world in an attitude precisely analagous to this. He, to whom the future is as the present, to whom things that are not are as things that are, has before Him in the person of Adam the represented human race ; with that race He is about to try a dangerous and an unlawful experiment ; an experiment for which, in future ages, He will be called to account by Arminians, Pelagians, and infidels. He knows that the first parent is to blame, and that with the first parent the blame of the great transgression should rest. He knows that it would be contrary to every principle of right and justice to inflict woes and sufferings on millions of millions innumerable, on account of the sin of that one individual ; for if the Rev. Dr. R. S. Foster knows that this was unjust, God, the all-wise God, must certainly have known it too. In spite of all this, however, in spite of the guiltlessness of humanity, in spite of the flagrant wrong of making the transgression of their chief the gronnd of condemnation to unborn myriads, He proceeds to pass sentence of death — death bodily, spiritual, and eternal — on the entire series of generations from the beginning to the end of time. I conclude as I begun, with the remark that the trial of our first parents was,, according to the teachings of Arminianism, of the nature of a farce — a solemn, a stupendous, an awful farce.

John Smith.