choice power. So, " The world cannot hate you, but Me it hateth." So in common conversation a mau says, "I cannot love this or that person, calling the force of his will power."
Augustine says : " If I be asked why they could not believe, I answer in a word, Because they would not." — He also says, "It is said of the Omnipotent, He cannot deny Himself : and this is the power of the Divine will. So ' they could not believe ' is the fault of the humau will."
Zwingle also says that " could not " means " would not."
Ecolampadius observes : "They would not, and therefore they could not believe. God is wont to punish those who commit some sin by giving them up to other sins." This, he remarks, is the heaviest judgment to which we can be given up, — to have sins punished by sins, that is, by being let alone to commit them.
Bishop Hall says: " They could not believe, because, as Isaiah says, in a just punishment for their maliciousness and contempt, God had stricken them with a reprobate sense, so that their eyes were blinded."
Quesnel says here : " Let us bewail this inability of will with which, by means of Adam's sin, we are all born, and which, by our own sins, we daily increase. Let us continually have re- course to Him who said, ' without Me ye can do uothiug,' and, ' No man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him.' "
40. — [He hath blinded' their eyes, etc.~\ This quotation is a free paraphrase of the general view of a verse in Isaiah vi. 9, 10. I think it can only have one meaning. That meaning is, that " God had given over the Jews to judicial blindness, as a punishment for their long-continued and obstinate rejection of His warnings." That God does in some cases give people over, as a punishment for obstinate unbelief, and that He may be justly termed the cause of such unbelief, is I think, quite plain in Scripture. Pharaoh is a case in point. He obstinately refused God's warnings, and so at last He was given over, and God is said to have " hardened his heart." Compare Joshua xi. 20: " It was of the Lord to harden their hearts, that they should come against Israel in battle, that He might destroy them." (So Deut. ii. 30; 1 Sam. ii. 25; Rom. ix. 18.)
This is no doubt a very solemn and awful subject. It seems at first sight to make God the author of man's destruction, But surely a moment's reflection will show us that God is a Sovereign in punishing, and may punish in any way he pleases. Some He cuts off suddenly the moment they sin. Others He gives over to judicial blindness, and ceases to strive with their consciences. "The Judge of all the earth will certainly do right." Those whom He is said to " harden and blind " will always be found to be persons whom He had previously warned, exhorted, and constantly summoned to repent. And never is He said to harden and blind, and give men up to judicial hardness and