holiness may be everywhere caused to exist, and universal obedience to the divine will secured. The only principle, it clearly seems to us, on which we can reconcile such glaring discrepancies between the express will of God and the event, is, that the event is of such a nature that it is not an object of power, or cannot be caused to exist by the Divine Omnipotence. For his “secret will,” or rather his executive will, is always in perfect harmony with his revealed will. It is from an inattention to the foregoing principle, that theologians have not been able to see and vindicate the sincerity of God, in the offer of salvation to all men. We have examined their efforts to remove this difficulty, and been constrained to agree with Dr. Dick, that “we may pronounce these attempts to reconcile the universal call of the gospel with the sincerity of God, to be a faint struggle to extricate ourselves from the profundities of theology.” But on looking into those solutions again, in which for some years we found a sort of rest, we could clearly perceive why theology had struggled in vain to deliver itself from its profound embarrassments on this subject, as well as on many others. These solutions admit the very principle which necessarily creates the difficulty, and renders a satisfactory answer impossible. Discard this false principle, substitute the truth in its stead, and the sincerity of God will come out from every obscurity, and shine with unclouded splendour. Section II. The attempt of Howe to reconcile the eternal ruin of a portion of mankind with the sincerity of God in his endeavours to save them. To illustrate the justness of the remark just made, we shall select that solution of the difficulty in question which has been deemed the most profound and satisfactory. We mean the solution of “the wonderful Howe.”(161) This celebrated divine clearly saw the impossibility of reconciling the sincerity of God with the offer of salvation to all, on the supposition that he does anything to prevent the salvation, or promote the ruin of those who are finally lost. He rejects the scheme of necessity, or a concurrence of the divine will, in relation to the sinful volitions of men, as aggravating the difficulty which he had undertaken to solve. This was one great step towards a solution. But it still remained to “reconcile God’s prescience of the sins of men with the wisdom and sincerity of his counsels, exhortations, and whatsoever means he uses to prevent them.” Let us see how he has succeeded in his attempt to accomplish this great object.