what is lost must once have existed. But on the system of universal necessity, free-will must be denied to man, whether fallen or unfallen, and even to God himself; and the fall cannot consist in the loss of what is in itself radically inconsistent with the tie which connects all the phenomena of the universe.
Yet the doctrine of free-will has, during the last and the present century, been exposed to the attacks of men of an aim and spirit very different from those of the infidel necessarians to whom we have referred. A system of universal necessity, substantially the same with that of Hobbes and Collins, was employed for the defence of some of the more peculiar doctrines of the Calvinistic interpretation of Christianity, by one of the most vigorous of the thinkers who in modern times have consecrated intellect to the service of revealed religion. President Edwards of New England, in his well-known “Inquiry into the modern prevailing notions of that Freedom of the Will, &c.,” adopted the necessarian hypothesis, as a foundation on which certain portions of the interpretation of Scripture, contained in the Reformed Confessions, might be unanswerably vindicated from the attacks of the philosophers.
The substance of the argument thus adopted by Edwards is likely to be familiar to most of those who are interested in this discussion. The essential part of his reasoning may be condensed within a few sentences, although, owing to the expansion needed for the application of it to meet the various forms of objection, philosophical and theological, by which it had been or might
