A Calvinistic divine, of the name of Petit Pierre, was ejected from his
church at Neufchatel for preaching and publishing the doctrine that the
damned would at some future period be pardoned. A member said to him,
"My good friend, I no more believe in the eternity of hell than
yourself; but recollect that it may be no bad thing, perhaps, for your
servant, your tailor, and your lawyer, to believe in it." Whitefield was
once preaching in Haworth, and made use of some such expression, as that
he "hoped there was no need to say much to this congregation, as they
had sat under so pious and godly a minister for so many years;"
whereupon Mr. Grimshaw, the curate, stood up in his place, and said with
a loud voice, "Oh, sir! for God's sake do not speak so. I pray you do
not flatter them. I fear the greater part of them are going to hell with
their eyes open." Cowper's friend, Newton, says this in one of his
letters: "A friend of mine was desired to visit a woman in prison; he
was informed of her evil habits of life, and therefore spoke strongly of
the terrors of the Lord, and the curses of the law: she heard him a
while, and then laughed in his face; upon this he changed his note, and
spoke of the Saviour, and what he had done and suffered for sinners. He
had not talked long in this strain before he saw a tear or two in her
eyes: at length she interrupted him by saying: 'Why, sir, do you think
there can be any hope of mercy for me?' He answered, 'Yes, if you feel
your need of it, and are willing to seek it in God's appointed way. I am
sure it is as free for you as for myself.' She replied, 'Ah, if I had
thought so, I should not have been in this prison. I long since settled
it in my mind that I was utterly lost; that I had sinned beyond all
possibility of forgiveness, and that made me desperate.'" Monod relates
that the Moravian missionaries who carried the gospel to the
Greenlanders thought it best to prepare the minds of the savages to
receive it, by declaring to them at first only the general truths of
religion; the existence of God, the obedience due to his laws, and a
future retribution. Thus passed away several years, during which they
saw no fruit of their labors. At last they ventured one day to speak to
them of the Saviour, and read to them the history of his passion. They
had no sooner done so, than one of the hearers, named Kajarnak,
approached the table where the missionary Beck was sitting, and said to
him in an earnest, affecting tone: "What is that you tell us? Repeat
that once more. I too will be saved!" ("The most awfully tremendous of
all metaphysical divines," wrote an eminent Englishman, "is the American
ultra Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, whose book on Original Sin I
unhappily read when a very young man. It did me an irreparable
mischief.")
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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