This is a subject, permit me here to say, on which I touch with more reluctance than upon any other point involved in this controversy. To represent the thing as it is, seems so much like accusing our brethren of insincerity and duplicity, that nothing but a regard to truth would induce me to allude to it. Whether this arises from an excessive but honest zeal for their system, or whether it is supposed the cause is so important, and at the same time so difficult to be sustained, that the end will justify what, in other cases, would be judged questionable policy, and hardly reconcilable with the spirit of a guileless Christianity, is certainly not for me to decide. With respect to their motives, they will stand or fall by the judgment of Him that trieth the reins. But the course, at any rate, seems very reprehensible. Take one instance:--All sinners, we are told, may come to Christ _if they will;_ and therefore they are criminal if they do not.--Now this mode of speech corresponds very well with Scripture and reason. And who, that had not been specially instructed in the dialect of this theology, would understand that this mode of speech, according to Hopkinsian technics, implied an inability and an impossibility of obtaining salvation? And yet this is the fact: for though, according to this system, if we have a will to come to Christ, we _may_, yet by a _Divine constitution_ it is as much impossible to have this will as it is to break the decree of Jehovah,--Hence all such modes of speech are worse than unmeaning; they have a deceptive meaning. They mean one thing in this creed, and another thing in popular language. It never occurs to the generality of mankind, when they are told they may do thus and thus, _if they will_, that there is a secret omnipotent influence impelling and controlling the will. They suppose these expressions, therefore, mean that, independent of all irresistible foreign influences, they have, within themselves, the power to choose or not to choose: and yet the real meaning of the speaker differs as much from this, as a negative differs from an affirmative.