The charge of injustice comes with a very ill grace too from the mouth of rebels incarnate. They have no claim upon Jehovah for a single favor. Having forfeited all by sin, their real desert is death eternal. So that, had Jehovah thought proper to have passed by the whole human race, they would have had no more real cause to blame, as unjust, this judicial pretention, than the angels have, who are unexceptionably and eternally lost. Instead of quarrelling, therefore, with his dispensations and his truths, which, like his own nature, are inscrutable; it becomes us, as sinners, to fall down at his footstool with self-abhorrence, and to adore that great mystery of redemption that hath opened a way of salvation for any; and, instead of indulging a proud and disputatious temper, “to give all diligence to make our calling and election sure.” If a contrary spirit were carried to its full extent, there would be no end of impeaching the divine justice in the affairs of the universe. The same pride that actuated the Jews to kill the Son of God, because he pleaded the divine sovereignty in choosing Naaman and the woman of Sarepta as objects of his favors, above all the lepers or widows in Israel, Luke, iv. 27, would lead men to inquire with arrogance, why this man is born to riches and honors, while another inherits poverty and wretchedness;—why some are idiots, and others adorned with bright and cultivated understandings;—why some inherit disease from their birth, and drag on a miserable life for years in torture and pining sickness, while others enjoy an unintermitted portion of health through every period of their lives, and go down to their graves without any pain, save that of dying, which, with such, is often a short and easy transition;—why it is the fate of some to be the unhappy subjects of insanity, that torturing disease of the mind, which secludes them from society, and makes them dreaded as the most furious animals; while others, by the free and vigorous exertion of their mental powers, are ornaments to society, and preside in the management of states and empires;—why multitudes are condemned to the galleys, or, for no other crime but that of defenceless and impoverished condition, are sold for slaves, and, by an inhuman traffic, become the property of Christian tyrants, who often treat them more barbarously than the beasts that perish, while others enjoy the protection of law, and all the blessings of civil and religious liberty;—why one country is burnt up with heat, another is a region of inhospitable deserts, or inaccessible mountains; a scene of barrenness and desolation; and a third is visited with the pestilence, or shaken with continual earthquakes; while other parts of the globe are crowned with perpetual verdure, are blessed with plenty and fertility, and enjoy that constitutional peace, and unanimity, to which those nations are strangers, that are torn with faction and depopulated by the sword;—why