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BOSTON REVIEW.

VOL. IV. NOVEMBER, 1864.-No. 24.

ARTICLE I.

EQUITY OF THE DIVINE GOODNESS.

THE popular conception of the goodness of God is exceedingly vague and defective. The main idea is that of parental sympathy, with no proper comprehension of its elementary nature and constitutional limitations. The goodness of the Almighty Father is the constant theme of eulogy with many whose views of this attribute appear to have little in common with its inspired definition: "Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy; for thou renderest unto every man according to his work."

The error results from a defective view of the divine justice, leading to the sinking of the governmental in the paternal character of God, the forgetting that the Maker of man is also his sovereign. It is lost sight of that Jehovah assumed the relation of creator to unintelligent and intelligent beings, not as an ultimate object, but as subsidiary to another and far grander purpose the extension of his supreme, everlasting, universal jurisdiction over the creatures to whom his uncounselled will and omnipotence had given existence.

Here, then, we find the central point to which all other views of the divine character, all other studies of the divine works, converge. If creation, in all its parts, exists with a direct reference to the extension over it of his control who made it, all our investigations of the Godhead, whether in nature or revela

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tion, are chiefly valuable to us, as they clearly and truly illustrate the nature of God's supreme rule. The production from nothing of universal being was a stupendous work; but the laying the foundations of universal government was far more stupendous. The analyzing of the constitution of created things, rational and irrational, is an engaging, noble employment; but fraught with a loftier wisdom, and urgent with a more pressing need, and opening to vaster, richer fields of thought, is the investigation of the rudimental laws by which Jehovah reigns upon the eternal throne.

It will aid our progress here to remember that the God who created and who governs is the same. But as the latter is the ulterior office, we must attach no ideas to him as creator which, transferred to him as sovereign, will involve him in a want of integrity. We involve ourselves in gross delusion, if, while tracing delightedly the footsteps of the divine goodness in the natural world, we draw conclusions respecting that goodness, which, invested with the trusts of moral administration, would overturn the foundations of personal and public justice.

The purpose of this article is to assert and defend the Equity of the Divine Goodness in moral government; in other words -that this amiable attribute of Deity rests firmly upon, and works steadily within, the fixed conditions of impartial rectitude. God is good because he is always right.

All benevolent government presupposes these facts:

That it aims to secure some rational and valuable result as its final object:

That it recognizes some law which shall regulate its administration:

That obedience to such law is obligatory on the governed: That obedience or disobedience does constitute a radical dissimilarity of character and position in the eye of that government, and must secure a corresponding difference of treatment; else it lays itself liable to the charge of arbitrary rule or abject impotency.

These principles are involved, by the nature of the case, in the structure of the divine government. It has a final purpose: and we hazard little in saying that this purpose is the production of the largest practicable amount of true, substantial well-being

throughout the universe; that is, the securing of the highest attainable glory to the sovereigaty of heaven, which we regard as convertible expressions. Nothing short of this can be predicated of God's known perfections. Whether this final purpose shall banish all evil and suffering from his empire, or find a limit to its production of happiness, is an important question which will meet us at another point of this inquiry.

So too does the government of God recognize and publish a supreme and changeless law. Nor can the obligation of the creature to obey that law be questioned, when even hostility itself confesses that its spirit is as faultless as its Author is perfect.

But obedience involves a voluntary act of the mind preferring compliance with law to its rejection and transgression. It implies the possibility of a wrong decision, the refusal of submission to authority-disobedience.

These are primary truths lying at the basis of all organized authority which is deserving that name. We are unable to conceive of an equitable jurisdiction over rational beings which does not involve them. There must be law, and obligation, and power of mental determination to respect or reject its claims. A moral government is easily conceivable in which the presence of actual disobedience shall not exist; where, under strong constraining and constantly purifying influences, every choice and act shall be holy. Heaven is so governed, freely, yet without sin. But to affirm the practicability of an administration of law over accountable agents in which transgression shall be absolutely impossible under all contingences, seems to be the confounding of all just distinctions.

The seal of the primal creative work was this; "And God saw every thing which he had made, and behold, it was very good." To vindicate that seal, it was not demanded of a God of goodness, that in setting up the framework of moral government on earth he should render rebellion against his authority an impossibility. This would have been to organize, not a moral government, but essentially one of physical forces over passive, irrational, unaccountable beings. The Lord intended no such jurisdiction over creatures made in his own image. He placed them under law, such law as rules the unfallen in

heaven; he illumined the excellence of that law to their intellect and conscience; he moved their moral nature by powerful influences to obedience -personal experience, however, of the evil of sin was a dissuasive which they could not feel; but, guarding inviolably the dignity, the innermost manhood, the essential quality, of the human soul, its choosing power, he threw on it the responsibility of its own ultimate resolve to live or die. If God could not equitably have done less than this, did justice or goodness require of him to do more? To have rendered sinning impossible would have demanded the reconstruction of man upon the scale of the inferior animals. He formed a government the design of which was beneficent; he published a law which itself was the charter of celestial privileges and blessedness; he made man holy, and surrounded him with powerful influences to keep him thus—if not the most powerful compatible with the infantile condition of our race, certainly that were consistent with his own wisdom. All this God's goodness did accomplish. We ask again, was he under any obligation to infinite equity to do more?

Does the objector venture the reply that, foreseeing the revolt of mankind, it would better have comported with a just benevolence to have foreborne the origination of all moral government, of all accountable creatures? and if of human, then equally of angelic souls. This is a difficult point where the finite should tread reverentially as in the very presence of the Infinite. Words should be few and well chosen here. It is safe, however, to say that though God has no preference for sin to holiness either in the general or in the detail; though, as actual sovereign, he has done nothing to introduce or perpetuate, but everything to restrain and exclude it, yet it must be true that the final issue of his reign to the universe, ruinous as the offender will make it to his own soul, will nevertheless secure immeasurably more glory to God, well-being throughout his empire, than had the blended history of sin and redemption and holiness never chequered the annals of time. While the Most High has never done nor instigated moral evil that good might come, he has known how, when men, originally made upright, have persisted to seek out many wicked inventions, to cause their wrath to praise him.

"A wonder-working alchemy draineth elixir out of poisons."

It might with entire fairness be asked, why are not the same objections urged against the equitable management of human power which are levelled against the divine? Is there the record of an administration on earth under which the possibility and the fact of civil and criminal disobedience, and consequent suffering, have not existed? Yet who, in his senses, would impeach the clemency and uprightness of that administration, or infer that the presiding will preferred this state of things to its contrary? Is the concession made so universally and properly here, a concession merely to the imperfectness of human works, or does not the demand for it lie further back in the elementary conditions of the problem itself? "The origin of evil (writes Neander) can only be understood as a fact possible by virtue of the freedom belonging to a created being; but not to be otherwise deduced or explained."*

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Passing from these incipient stages of moral government over our race, we proceed to trace our leading idea in later developments of human rebellion, and divine restraints and remedies.

Sin is nonconformity to righteous law. Law, whether divine or human, is not simply good advice. Law is obligatory. Advice is not, necessarily. In the former there is a claim to obedience. If so, there must be the means of enforcing it stronger than mere precept or persuasion. That is, law must have sanctions of punishment and rewards by which to make good its authority over the governed, or it is no law. This is one of the most familiar and practical of truths entering into the stability of all human governments public or domestic, poising upon itself the very existence of national and social security.

The true doctrine of punishment, under the divine government as elsewhere, is this: without it law can not be upheld with any adequately binding force or respectability, but degenerates into powerless, unheeded exhortation. Without the upholding of law, government necessarily falls into riotous anarchy, carrying down with it all social well-being. Recalling now a former point that the grand aim of God's jurisdiction is to secure to his universe the utmost attainable amount of good, of holiness and consequent blessedness, thus

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* History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apostles. p. 238. Note.

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