We have shown before that the perfection of the knowledge does not settle the mode of causation; that which comes to pass by necessity, and that which comes to pass contingently, are alike known to God. CONCLUSION. I here finish my review of Edwards's System, and his arguments against the opposite system. I hope I have not thought or written in vain. The review I have aimed to conduct fairly and honourably, and in supreme reverence of truth. As to style, I have laboured only for perspicuity, and where a homely expression has best answered this end, I have not hesitated to adopt it. The nice graces of rhetoric, as popularly understood, cannot be attended to in severe reasoning. To amble on a flowery surface with fancy, when we are mining in the depths of reason, is manifestly impossible. The great man with whose work I have been engaged, I honour and admire for his intellectual might, and love and venerate for a purity and elevation of spirit, which places him among the most sainted names of the Christian church. But have I done wrong not to be seduced by his genius, nor won and commanded by his piety to the belief of his philosophy? I have not done wrong if that be a false philosophy. When he leads me to the cross, and speaks to me of salvation, I hear in mute attention--and one of the old preachers of the martyr age seems to have re-appeared. But when we take a walk in the academian grove, I view him in a different character, and here his voice does not sound to me so sweet as Plato's. The first part of my undertaking is accomplished. When I again trouble the public with my lucubrations, I shall appear not as a reviewer, but in an original work, which in its turn must become the subject of philosophical criticism. THE END. Footnotes [1] "It is remarkable that the advocates for necessity have adopted a distinction made use of for other purposes, and forced it into their service; I mean moral and natural necessity. They say natural or physical necessity takes away liberty, but moral necessity does not: at the same time they explain moral necessity so as to make it truly physical or natural. That is physical necessity which is the _invincible_ effect of the law of nature, and it is neither less natural, nor less insurmountable, if it is from the laws of spirit than it would be if it were from the laws of matter."--(Witherspoon's Lectures on Divinity, lect. xiii.) [2] Natural inability, and a want of liberty, are identified in this usage; for the want of a natural faculty essential to the performance of an action, and the existence of an impediment or antagonistic force, which takes from a faculty supposed to exist, the _liberty_ of action, have the same bearing upon responsibility.