The main point of difference between these two classes is in reference to that most disheartening and deplorable tenet of men's entire inability to "amend their depraved nature," or even to "dispose themselves for its amendment." The strict Calvinist maintains that the mind of man is so entirely ruined in its nature that no one but the Author of mind can rectify it, while he can in no way be moved to this act of mercy (justice?) by any thing the _unrenewed_ creature can do. The Arminian sects hold that, though the "natural man" is utterly incapable of any acceptable moral action in himself, yet, through the atonement of Jesus Christ, he is endowed with "a gracious supernatural ability," by which he can accept the offers of salvation. This, it is supposed, is a statement that most Arminians would accept as expressing their views. In our own country, the earliest leader of an attempt to modify the Calvinistic system was the celebrated metaphysician, Jonathan Edwards. While maintaining, as did Arminius, the foundation theory of an utterly depraved mental constitution of the race as a penalty for the first act of disobedience, he first labored to prove this penalty to be _just_, inasmuch as in some mysterious way the whole race existed in Adam, and sinned just as he did, thus becoming the authors of their own mental ruin and incapacity. And inasmuch as our moral nature revolts from the infliction of penalties for not doing what there is _no power_ to do, he originated a metaphysical theory to this effect: that, in spite of the injury resulting from this first sin of the whole race, there is full power and obligation in every human being to obey all that the laws of God demanded, but that man is _unwilling_ instead of _unable_. This _unwillingness_ is the result of that first sin of the race; and so great is its pertinacity, that no man ever did or ever will feel or act right in a single case, from the beginning to the end of life, until "regenerated by the Holy Spirit." Neither will they do any thing "to amend their depraved nature," or to "dispose themselves to its amendment;" nor will any man, before "regeneration by the Holy Spirit," do a single thing that has even any _tendency_ to gain this Divine aid, but it is all dependent on "sovereign, unconditional election." Still worse, the more efforts an unrenewed man makes to love and obey God, the more wicked he grows, because he is _voluntarily_ resisting increased light and obligation in refusing to regenerate himself, which, on this theory, he had full power to do.