ART. IV. THE METHODIST DOCTRINE OF FREE WILL. Or all the great denominations of Christendom Methodists alone decidedly and unanimously teach the doctrine of free will. Why we stand alone in this respect it is difficult to see. What connection can there be between foreordination and immersion? Why should Low Church Episcopalians incline toward predestination and those of the High Church lean toward free will? The Congregationalists have saturated New England with Calvinism; but as each local church formulates its own creed the new societies, feeling the spirit of the age, experience a relapse and reaction from the teachings of the Puritan fathers. Luther and Melanchthon, though believers in predestination, sensibly concluded not to make any dogmatic statement of it for their followers; yet the broad, creedless State Church of Germany is Calvinistic. Even Arminius did not succeed in planting Arminianism in his native land. The Council of Dort condemned his doctrines after he was dead. But Wesley and Fletcher embodied them in the very heart of Methodist theology; while the fathers and founders of American Methodism made free will the keynote in their cheery and trustful song of love divine— A lay Whose melody shall haunt the world for aye, So Methodism has been unswerving in its teachings on this subject from the days when Susannah Wesley wrote her admirable letters to her son, through all its after history, making old England and young America ring with the proclamation of free will, free grace, and universal redemption. It was Augustine, in the year 412, that first formulated those dreadful doctrines which are embodied in the Augustinian theology, in opposition to poor Pelagius, held up as an Antinomian and a heretic, while this hot-headed and doughty defender of divine sovereignty was canonized as a saint. John Calvin, in the sixteenth century, a man of rich genius' and powerful personality, systematized the teachings of Augustine in the famous Institutes of the Christian Religion. From his throne of power at Geneva he almost ruled both Church and State. He laid such stress on the dogma of divine decrees that the whole system which embodies that dogma bears his name. From this standpoint he could see no contingency; all was doomed, decreed, eternally fixed, as though God cared more for the glory of his omnipotence than for the glory of his redeeming grace. Thomas Carlyle imagines a monument over a dead lion, setting forth how many sheep he had slaughtered and how many kids and hares he had consumed. Calvin seems to have erected a similar monument to the Most High. He would have glorified Vesuvius, belching flame and stones, rather than Hermon and Tabor, with sunny slopes and glowing summits luring men's thoughts from earth to heaven. A great part of mankind doomed to glorify God's punitive justice! Justice, indeed! The other part of mankind picked out, with or without reason, like jewels from the mass of uncleanness, to shine in praise of divine love! But what kind of love is it that can create beings to be the objects of wrath? What kind of humanity is it that can be resigned to such a selecting and setting apart of individuals? What a self-complacent kind of theology is that which can coolly submit to seeing millions of creatures doomed to hopeless woe to satisfy absolute and eternal justice-or, according to the Hopkinsian putting of the case, "for the good of the universe"-while the favored few are allowed to look on from the heights of supernal bliss? And yet, on this strong meat were nourished such stalwart Christians as Cromwell and William, Prince of Orange, together with the Roundheads and Covenanters and Puritans and the heroic Huguenots; Blaise Pascal, also, and the Jansenists; John Knox and Thomas Chalmers and Robert Hall; that princely preacher, George Whitefield, and that king of the modern pulpit, Charles H. Spurgeon; with myriads of men and women of whom the world was not worthy-only showing how much better people can be than their creed. Whittier, in "My Namesake," suggests a beautiful apology for them as well as for himself: For, awed by Sinai's Mount of Law, The trembling faith alone sufficed, That, through its cloud and flame, he saw In the middle of the eighteenth century that man of might, Jonathan Edwards, set the seal of his master mind on New England thought and the theology of the Christian world. It was during his ministry at Northampton that he preached and published those powerful sermons which produced such overwhelming effects, especially the one entitled, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." The very title is enough to make one shudder. No doubt his eloquence was terrific and appalling. No wonder some of the congregation held to the backs of the pews to prevent themselves from sliding into hell! But were such lurid pictures of fire and blood and wrath true to the facts as found in gospel teaching? Did the powerful preacher truly represent God, or did he misrepresent and blaspheme his Maker? It must be confessed that about the same time, beyond the sea, some of the coadjutors of Wesley often preached sermons hardly less sulphurous and sanguinary. See the published sermons of the Rev. Joseph Benson. Yet there was an essential difference between Joseph Benson's Deity, who provided a hell into which no sinner sank save by the weight of his own deservings, and the Deity of Jonathan Edwards, who, as it seems to us, surrounded the sinner with such a resistless maelstrom of motives, passions, and decrees that he must inevitably be sucked into the all-devouring sea of wrathful retribution. It was in 1754, while living in the lonely little village of Stockbridge, Mass., that Edwards finished that masterpiece of argument, his Essay on the Freedom of the Will, by which he really meant the bondage of the will; for the only freedom he allowed was the freedom to act according to the will. In fact, the will was in his eyes synonymons with "the affections." His reasoning in reference to the prevailing motive is almost unanswerable. Edwards considers foreknowledge as implying foreordination, just as future events imply present facts and grow out of those facts. Bledsoe, in his Theodicy, answers with a summary sneer, "As if Omniscience had not ways of seeing the future which we know not of!" But that is not an answer. The question at issue is, Can a contingent future be foreseen, even by a Being of infinite foresight, and yet remain contingent? To this question Calvinists reply with a thunderous and unanimous "negative!" Dr. L. D. McCabe escapes the logic of this conclusion by the startling and almost confounding theory-not original with him-of "divine nescience." Possibly it may be the only consistent solution of the problem of evil, which, in its Arminian form, would be, "Could not the Deity have created beings that would not have sinned?" Possibly it would have been contradictory and impossible to create free moral beings who would not, soon or late, fall into sin. Possibly, also, as Bushnell in his chapter on "Sin," in Nature and the Supernatural, has almost demonstrated, the fall, and sin itself, may be overruled for the highest welfare of the race. But, in any case, in perfect accord with freedom, a free agent can be foreseen, both by a finite and an infinite mind, as doing certain acts without being bound and compelled and eternally predestined to do them. Character and habit merge into moral certainty, and yet remain essentially free. One of the most original and baffling arguments in Edwards's treatise on the will is that on the infinite series of choices presupposed in every act of choice-infinity in a finite intelligence. Yet we may find that this apparent reductio ad absurdum is really a petitio principii. It seems to take for granted that mind is merely mechanical, having no self-originating energy to determine its own actions. The very idea of will implies the "self-beginning of activity," so that to speak of free will is a mere tautology. If the will exists at all it is free; if not free it is practically nonexistent. It was reserved for our own Dr. Whedon not only to besiege and capture, but to demolish, this strong fortress of Edwardsian logic. Whedon meets Edwards squarely, fairly, and triumphantly. Some of our Methodist controversialists, notably the late able and venerable Dr. Curry, compromised with Calvinism to some extent and talked about "the guilt of original sin," as the younger Edwards and the late President Smith and Dr. Hodge, Jr., in his debate with Curry, at Chautauqua, compromised with Arminianism; but Whedon has shown that any other than individual and responsible freedom is only "a clockhammer freedom," which admits of no accountability. The clock "can keep better time than we with all our wits;" but no one in possession of his wits would ever think of punishing the clock even if it did not keep quite accurate time. The trouble with Calvinistic predestination is that it is not preachable, not talkable, and not even thinkable. It will not stand the test of practical application. The poet Lowell makes the irrepressible Hosea Biglow say: The fust thing for sound politicians to larn is, ... No, never say nuthin' without you're compelled tu, For the ign'ant to put to incend'ary use. May we not be allowed to commend this astute advice to the defenders of an impracticable and impossible creed? Why hold on to it as with a death-grasp ruled by Calvin's dead hand from his very grave, trying to soften its asperities, and still keep mumbling the decrees as Roman priests do the mass in an unknown tongue, patching new pieces of truth to old garments of error worn in the Dark Ages, when might made right? Why not throw away these dark and dismal dogmas that dishonor God and outrage common sense, and if we must believe in the "five points" of Calvinism say nothing about it, but let the people simply repent and believe the Gospel? Our Methodist fathers, like our Revolutionary sires, raised an insurrection against "the Stamp Act" bearing the impress of Calvin's iron hand, and tossed into the sea of oblivion the worse than British tea of Calvinistic teaching; but, as in the days of King George the taint of Toryism was felt, so even among the early Methodists the touch and taint of Calvinism were sometimes seen. Unguarded expressions floated in the air-halftruths, the most dangerous kind of errors. One of these was, "No merit in any creature," which would logically imply no demerit, no guilt, no need of forgiveness, and no need whatever of the atonement. The doctrine of "total depravity" needs an Arminian restatement; otherwise, it locks us up in Calvinism. It has led many a man to hide behind his own helplessness and do nothing toward the salvation of his own soul. Our seventh article of religion says man is "very far gone from original righteousness," which is true; but when that article came from the Calvinistic Synod of Dort it read, elapsus quam longis |