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Arnold to "come over into Macedonia and help." Much as she had suffered in her early religious life from predestinarianism, she never was a bigot, and so she, like Paul, "gathered assuredly" that the call was of the Lord, and "without gainsaying" went and helped them publicly and from house to house as best she could.
Then, with a kind of a Turkish predestinarianism, they would say, if it pleased God to strike them, it was all one whether they went abroad or stayed at home; they could not escape it, and therefore they went boldly about, even into infected houses and infected company; visited sick people; and, in short, lay in the beds with their wives or relations when they were infected.
Since then all corruptions down from Moloch to modern predestinarianism, and the human sacrifices of the heathens to the christian sacrifice of the Creator, have been produced by admitting of what is called revealed religion, the most effectual means to prevent all such evils and impositions is, not to admit of any other revelation than that which is manifested in the book of Creation., and to contemplate the Creation as the only true and real word of God that ever did or ever will exist; and every thing else called the word of God is fable and imposition.
The "limae labor" with him was unsparing. It was, he tells us, "first with doing, and then with undoing, and after that with doing again," that his books were brought to completion, and became what they are, a mine of Evangelical Calvinism of the richest ore, entirely free from the narrow dogmatism and harsh predestinarianism of the great Genevan divine; books which for clearness of thought, lucidity of arrangement, felicity of language, rich even if sometimes homely force of illustration, and earnestness of piety have never been surpassed.
He seems, however, to have gotten along fairly well except with one "female," who, from all accounts, was given over in about equal parts to "universalism" and "predestinarianism." This troublesome female, that he candidly admitted he had a hard race to keep up with, he has left impaled for all time as a "thin-faced, Roman-nosed, loquacious, glib-tongued Yankee."
They undoubtedly often quickened conscience. But their system was a one-sided and unnatural one, indeed in the hands of some of its expounders threatening morality and soundness of character. It had none of the sweep which carried the justification doctrines of Luther, or the systematic predestinarianism of Calvin, or the "platform of discipline" of John Knox and the Puritans.
Let us refrain from this subject, remembering how grave and learned theologians, earnest opponents of Predestinarianism, have been reduced to the extreme of perplexity when confronted with the ensample of Pharaoh.
"'And for what, says I, 'do ye smoke be night in dark places widout even a cinturion in plain clothes to attend ye? "'Have ye ever heard, Michob, says the Imperor, 'of predestinarianism? "'I've had the cousin of it, says I. 'I've been on the trot with pedestrianism for many a year, and more to come, as ye well know.
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