Now by not adverting to this, and alas! misled by Jonathan Edwards's book, Fuller has hidden from himself and his readers the damnable nature of the doctrine--not of necessity (for that in its highest sense is identical with perfect freedom; they are definitions each of the other); but--of extraneous compulsion. O! even this is not adequate to the monstrosity of the thought. A denial of all agency;--or an assertion of a world of agents that never act, but are always acted upon, and yet without any one being that acts;--this is the hybrid of Death and Sin, which throughout this letter is treated so amicably! Another fearful mistake, and which is the ground of the former, lies in conceding to the Materialist, 'explicite et implicite', that the [Greek: noúmenon], the 'intelligibile', the 'ipseitas super sensibilis', of guilt is in time, and of time, and, consequently, a mechanism of cause and effect;--in other words, in confounding the [Greek: phainómena, tà rhéonta, tà màe óntôs ónta],--all which belong to time, and cannot be even thought of except as effects necessarily predetermined by the precedent causes, (themselves in their turn effects of other causes),--with the transsensual ground or actual power. After such admissions, no other possible defence can be made for Calvinism or any other 'ism' than the wretched recrimination: "Why, yours, Dr. Priestley, is just as bad!"--Yea, and no wonder:--for in essentials both are the same. But there was no reason for Fuller's meddling with the subject at all,--metaphysically, I mean. Ib. p. 95. If the unconditionality of election render it unfriendly to virtue, it must be upon the supposition of that view of things, "which attributes more to God, and less to man," having such ascendancy; which is the very reverse of what Dr. Priestley elsewhere teaches, and that in the same performance. But in both systems, as Fuller has erroneously stated his own, man is annihilated. There is neither more nor less; it is all God; all, all are but 'Deus infinite modificatus':--in brief, both systems are not Spinosism, for no other reason than that the logic and logical consequency of 10 Fullers + 10 X 10 Dr. Priestleys, piled on each other, would not reach the calf of Spinoza's leg. Both systems of necessity lead to Spinosism, nay, to all the horrible consequences attributed to it by Spinoza's enemies. O, why did Andrew Fuller quit the high vantage ground of notorious facts, plain durable common sense, and express Scripture, to delve in the dark in order to countermine mines under a spot, on which he had no business to have wall, tent, temple, or even standing-ground! [Footnote 1: The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems examined and compared, as to their moral tendency; in a series of Letters addressed to the friends of vital and practical religion; especially those amongst Protestant Dissenters. By Andrew Fuller. Market Harborough. 1793.] * * * * *