Calvinism has never had another advocate equally qualified with Edwards to vindicate its awful dogmata; and if, by his own confession, his most potent arguments would have failed to produce conviction in his own mind, without God's special influence, we see reason to suspect the validity of these arguments, until we have proof that he did indeed receive from heaven miraculous illumination. Such _special influence_ we may with propriety question, since a claim to inspiration can be supported only by the exercise of miraculous powers. Deny, therefore, the inspiration of this profound writer, of which there is no proof, and we have his own authority against the conclusiveness of his own arguments; since he confesses that by their cogency alone they are insufficient to produce conviction in opposition to our just and natural conceptions of the righteous character of God. Let us not, therefore, crouch with timid servility to great names. The opinions of men of erudition, and genius, and holy zeal for religion, are to be examined with modest deference, but not to be received with implicit credulity. In the most enlightened and holy men, who, since the decease of the apostles, have served God and his Christ; in the fathers of the ancient Church; in those who headed the Protestant Reformation, and lived as saints, or died as martyrs; in Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, we discover humiliating proofs of imperfection and fallibility. And, while the fundamental truths of Christianity have been preserved in the Catholic Church, those truths have been mingled or associated with errors so injurious and degrading, that no blind faith is to be rested on any _human authority_. Let us uphold the majesty of divine revelation, and vindicate our right and our duty to interpret the sacred page--not by the traditions of fallible men, not by the metaphysics of the schools, not by the "special influences" which an enthusiastic mind may construe into divine teaching, and which may be pleaded, with equal truth or falsehood, for every form of error; but by a sober reference to those moral perfections of the Deity, and to those essential attributes of human nature, the knowledge of which lies at the foundation of all sound religious belief. These are to be learned from the Scriptures, and are the key to their right interpretation. Edwards, incomparably the most able advocate of Calvinism, since the days of the reformer himself, is not a solitary example of the way in which a zealous pleader may, unwarily, betray and weaken his own cause.