Two causes seem to have operated in maintaining the notion that divine influence is often dissociated from concurrent means of suasion; the first of these is an ill-judged but excusable jealousy on the part of pious persons for the honor of Sovereign Grace; and is a mere reaction upon orthodoxy, from the Pelagian and semi-Pelagian heresies such persons have thought it necessary, for the safety of a most important doctrine, not merely to assert the supremacy of the ultimate agent; but to disparage, as much as possible, all intermediate instruments. The second of these causes is the imaginary difficulty felt by those who, having unadvisedly plunged into the depths of metaphysical theology, when they should have busied themselves only with the plain things of religion, fail in every attempt to adjust their notions of divine aid and human responsibility; and, therefore, if they would be zealous for the honor due to the first, think themselves obliged almost to nullify the second. If any such difficulty actually exists, it should be made to rest upon the operations of nature, where it meets us not less than in the precincts of theology; and the husbandman should desist from his toils until schoolmen have demonstrated to him the _rationale_ of the combined operations of first and second causes. Or if such a demonstration must not be waited for, and if the husbandman is to commit the precious grain to the earth, and to use all his skill and industry in favoring the inscrutable process of nature, then let the theologian pursue a parallel course, content to know, that while the Scriptures affirm in the clearest manner whatever may enhance our ideas of the necessity and sovereignty of divine grace, they nowhere give intimation of a suspended or halved responsibility on the part of man; but, on the contrary, use, without scruple, language which implies that the spiritual welfare of those who are taught depends on the zeal and labors of the teacher, as truly as the temporal welfare of children depends on the industry of a father. The practical consequences of such speculative confusions are seen in the frightful apathy and culpable negligence of some instructors and parents, who, because a metaphysical problem, which ought never to have been heard of beyond the walls of colleges, obstructs their understandings, have acquired the habit of gazing with indifference upon the profaneness and immoralities of those whom their diligence might have retained in the path of piety and virtue.