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He described themselves as covered all over with crimes, like a leprosy; as willful and determined rebels; as not only unworthy of the least of God's mercies, of the warm sun and refreshing rain, but deserving of the torments of the bottomless pit; but entreated that, devoid of all merit, as they were, and justly exposed to His wrath, their aggravated offences might be pardoned for the sake of One who had taken their burden upon Himself, and that they might be of the number of the elect, whom the foreordination of God had predestined to salvation.
Ride through France, you see the laborer in his wooden shoes, with scarce a thought beyond his daily toil. His Sunday is a fete for dancing and recreation. Go through New England, and you will find the laborer, as he lays his stone fence, discussing the consistency of foreordination with free will, or perchance settling some more practical mooted point in politics.
The world does not care to listen to prosy lectures on foreordination and the terrors of Tartarus, because its reason rejects such cruel creeds; it takes little interest in the question whether Christ was dipped or sprinkled by the gentleman in the camel's-hair cutaway, because it cannot, for the life of it, see that it makes any difference; it does not want to be worried with jejune speculations anent the Trinity, because it considers one God quite sufficient if it can but find him; does not want to hear much about the miracles, because it considers it a matter of absolute indifference whether they are true or not.
The doctrine of man's natural depravity and the divine foreordination of all things, it is held, must drive man either to despair, insanity, and suicide, or land him hopelessly in fatalism: he will simply continue his physical life in a mechanical way, like a brute or a plant; he merely vegetates.
Mark, all these thing are spoken as being already done; predestinated, called, justified, glorified. He doth not say, they shall be, but he hath done it, that is, in and according to the foreordination of God. "Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee." this is justification in the sight of the creature. And whereas you ask me, "do they that are born of God commit sin?" To this I answer,
And in this belief Mrs. Hill rested securely, but nevertheless did not fail to concoct several feminine artifices for the helping on of foreordination. It was a working belief with her that it was always well to have the gods in your debt. Violet Thayer came, saw, and conquered.
The good deacon sits in his pew and listens to the unfolding of proofs of election or foreordination. When the arguments have been piled up to sixteen or eighteen, the good man begins to chuckle with delight, saying, "Verily, this is a high day in Israel; my soul feasts on fat things." Other men want some flesh on their skeletons, but he is fed on the dry bones of logic.
"No man who preaches against me shall have my daughter; no, not if 't were Saint Paul himself." "For her eventual good I " "Damn her eventual " "I fear 't will come to that." "Well, well, Patty, perhaps it will," acceded the squire. "But since 't is settled already by foreordination, let the lass have a good time before it comes. Wouldst rather marry the parson than Phil, Janice?"
Putman Weale abundantly justifies the title of his new book, "The Conflict of Color" the seeming foreordination of some readjustment of racial relations if present tendencies continue when he asserts that while the white races double in eighty years, the yellow or brown double in sixty, and the black in forty.
Luckily, the other horses are as tired as thou, or my escape would be very questionable, even though I had wit enough about me to see to it that I got the officer's mount. Egad, a queer shift it is that ends with Lee in their hands and me spurring northward to repeat the general's orders to Sullivan. Who knows but Mrs. Meredith and the parson may be right in their holding to foreordination?"
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