(3.) In the third place, we object to universal foreordination because it destroys all moral distinctions. Praise has been bestowed upon Spinoza because he showed that moral distinctions are annihilated by the scheme of necessity. But, indeed, it requires very little perception to see that this must be the case. If God has, as is said, determined every event, then it is impossible for the creature to act otherwise than he does. A vast moral difference stands between the murderer and the saint. But if the doctrine of universal foreordination is true, we can neither blame the one nor praise the other. Each does as it was determined he should do, and could not but do, and to blame or praise anyone is impossible. "Man fondly dreams that he is free in act; Naught is he but the powerless worthless plaything Of the blind force that in his will itself Works out for him a dread necessity." There is therefore, according to this system, no right, no wrong, no sin, no holiness; for wherever necessity reigns, virtue and vice terminate. "Evil and good," says the Pantheist, "are God's right hand and left--evil is good in the making." Everything being fixed by God we can no more keep from doing what we do, than we can keep the earth from rolling round the sun. Since this monstrosity in morals results from the doctrine, it is evidently false. (4.) We object, in the fourth place, to universal foreordination, because it makes God the author of sin, the caveat of the Confession notwithstanding. It is said that God's foreknowledge involved foreordination. If so, the matter may be easily settled thus:--Does God foresee that men will sin? Of course He does. But if foreknowledge involves foreordination, then by the laws of logic He has foreordained sin. Syllogistically thus:--God only foreknows what He has fixed; but He foreknows sin, ergo, He fixed sin. We cannot resist this conclusion if we hold the premises. The Confession says He has foreordained everything, yet is He not the author of sin. But is it not clear as day that the author of a decree is the author of the thing decreed? David was held responsible for his decree regarding Uriah, and justly so. Had he been as clever as the authors of the Confession he could have parried that homethrust of Nathan, "Thou art the man." If everything that comes to pass was foreordained; David might have said, "I beg pardon, Nathan; it is true that I made the decree to have Uriah killed, but I did not kill him. Is it not the case that the author of a decree is not responsible for the sin of the decree?" Would Nathan have understood this logic? We think not. But if the Confession had been then in existence (if the anachronism may be pardoned), he might have appealed to it against Nathan; and we never should have had that awful threnody--the fifty-first Psalm. There is, then, no escape from the conclusion, that if everything that comes to pass has been