Paterson’s reasoning. If the case were really as he represents it and men in their mere misery, appealing solely to God’s pity, lay before the divine mind, it would be inexplicable that he did not save all. The physician who, having the power to treat and cure all his patients, arbitrarily discriminates between them and contents himself with ministering to some of them only, would justly incur the reprobation of men. But may not the judge, having the mere power to release all his criminals, be held back by higher considerations from realeasing them all? It may be inexplicable why a physician in the case supposed should not relieve all; while the wonder may well be in the case of the judge rather how he can release any. The love of God is in its exercise necessarily under the control of his righteousness: and to plead that his love has suffered an eclipse because he does not do all that he has the bare power to do, is in effect to deny to him a moral nature. The real solution to the puzzle that is raised with respect to the distribution of the divine grace is, then, not to be sought along the lines either of the denial of the omnipotence of God's grace with the Arminians, or of the denial of the reality of his reprobation with our neo-universalists, but in the affirmation of his righteousness. The old answer is after all the only sufficient one: God in his love saves as many of the guilty race of man as he can get the consent of his whole nature to save. Being God and all that God is, he will not permit even his ineffable love to betray him into any action which is not right. [93]
THE PLAN OF SALVATION
And it is therefore that we praise him and trust him and love him. For he is not part God, a God here and there, with some but not all the atrributes which belong to true God: he is God altogether, God through and through, all that God is and all that God ought to be.
Meanwhile, it is not the consistent universalism that demands the actual salvation of all sinners, which has been embraced by the mass of universaliz- ing Protestants. For one thing, the Scriptures are too clear to the contrary to permit the indulgence of this pleasant dream: it is all too certain that all men are not saved, but at the last day there remain the two classes of the saved and the lost, each of which is sent to the eternal destiny which belongs to it. The great problem requires to be faced by universalizing evangelicalism, therefore, of how it is God and God alone who saves the soul, and all that God does look- ing towards the saving of the soul he does to and for all men alike, and yet all men are not saved. Their attempts to solve this problem have given us the doctrinal constructions known as Evangelical Luther- anism and Evangelical Arminianism, both of which profess to combine an express evangelicalism and an express universalism, and yet to provide for the diverse issues of salvation and damnation. That these systems have succeeded in solving this (let us say it frankly, insoluble) problem, we of course do not believe; and the element in the problem which suffers in the forcible adjustments which they propose, is in
[ 94 ]
UNIVERSALISM
both cases the evangelical element. But it is never- theless to be frankly recognized that both systems profess to have found a solution and are therefore emphatic in their professions of both a pure evangeli- calism and a complete universalism in the operations of God looking to salvation. It will be worth our while to make this clear to ourselves. In doing so, however, we shall choose statements from which we may learn something more of the spirit and points of view of these great systems than the particular facts which are more immediately engaging our attention.
How deeply embedded the evangelical conviction is in the consciousness of evangelical Arminianism we may learn from an instructive enunciation of it by Dr. Joseph Agar Beet.” This enunciation occurs in a context in which Dr. Beet is with some heat re- pelling the doctrine of unconditional election. ‘This terrible error," he says, “prevalent a century ago, is but an overstatement of the important Gospel truth that salvation is, from the earliest turning to God to final salvation, altogether a work of God in man, and a merciful accomplishment of a purpose of God before the foundation of the world.” “In our rejection of this doctrine of unconditional election and predestina- tion, we must remember that salvation, from the earliest good desires to final salvation, is the accom- plishment of a divine purpose of mercy formed before the foundation of the world." In rejecting the doctrine of unconditional election, Dr. Beet is thus careful to preserve the evangelicalism which, he
(95 |
THE PLAN OF SALVATION