The learned doctor retorts, " Obedience must necessarily please God; but God is not bound by his justice necessarily to reward it." But the learned gentleman will hardly maintain that the relation of obedience to reward, and disobedience to punishment, is the same ; for God is bound to reward no man for obedience performed, for that is due to him by natural right : Luke xvii. 1 0, " So like- wise ye, when ye shall liave done all those things which are com- manded you, say. We are unprofitable servants ; we have done that which was our duty to do." Ps. xvi. 2, " My goodness extendeth not unto thee." But every man owes to God obedience, or is obnoxious to a vicarious punishment; nor can the moral dependence of a rational creature on its Creator be otherwise preserved : " The wages of ein is death ; but the gift of God is eternal life," Rom. vi. 23.
Away, then, with all proud thoughts of equalling the relation of obedience to reward and sin to punishment. " Who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things : to whom be glory for ever. Amen," Rom. xi. 35, 36. " What hast thou," O man, " that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?" 1 Cor. iv. 7. God requireth nothing of us but what he hath formerly given us; and, therefore, he has every right to require it, although he were to bestow no re- wards. What! doth not God observe a just proportion in the inflic- tion of punishments, so that the degrees of punishment, according to the rule of his justice, should not exceed the demerit of the trans- gression. "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" But beware, Dr Twisse, of asserting that there is any i)ro})ortion between the eternal fruition of God and the inexpressible participation of his
' Isti. xxxiii. 14.
AEGUMENTS — FROM THE DIVINE CHARACTER. 553
glory, in which he hath been graciously pleased that the reward of ' our obedience should consist, and the obedience of an insignificant reptile, almost less than nothing. Whatever dignity or happiness we arrive at, we are still God's creatures.
It is impossible that he who is blessed for ever and ever, and is so infinitely happy in his own essential glory that he stands in no need of us or of our services, and who, in requiring all that we are and all that we can do, only requires his own, can, by the receipt of it, be- come bound in any debt or obligation. For God, I say, from the be- ginning, stood in no need of our praise ; nor did he create us merely that he might have creatures to honour him, but that, agreeably to his goodness, he might conduct us to happiness.
But he again retorts, and maintains, "That God can punish where he does not hate ; and, therefore, he may hate and not punish : for he punished his most holy Son, whom God forbid that we should say he ever hated." But, besides that this mode of arguing from opposites hardly holds good in theology, though God hated not his Son when he punished him, personally considered, he however hated the sins on account of which he pimished him (and even him- self, substitutively considered, with respect to the effect of sin), no less than if they had been laid to any sinner. Yea, and from this argument it follows that God cannot hate sin and not punish it; for when he laid sins, which he hates, to the charge of his most holy Son, whom he loved with the highest love, yet he could not but punish him.
II. The representation or description of God, and of the divine na- ture in respect of its habitude^ to sin, which the Scriptures furnish us with, and the description of sin with relation to God and his justice, supply us with a second argument. They call God a " consuming fire," " everlasting burnings,"^ a God who " will by no means clear the guilty."'
They represent sin as " that abominable thing which he hateth," which he will destroy " as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff." ^ As, then, consuming fire cannot but bum and consume stubble, when applied to it, so neither can God do otherwise than punish sin, that abominable thing, which is consum- ing or destroying it, whenever presented before him and his justice.
But the very learned Twisse replies, "That God is a consuming fire, but an intelligent and rational one, not a natural and insensible one. And this," says he, " is manifest from this, that this fire once burnt something not consumable,* namely, his own Son, in whom there
' Habitude means the state of a person or a thing with relation to something else. The habitude of the divine nature with respect to sin is a disposition to punish it. — Te.
2 Heb. sii. 29; Deut. iv. 24; Isa. xxxiii. 14.
3 Esod. xxxiv. 7. * Jer. xliv. 4; Isa. v. 24.
« The word in the original is " combustible," meaning something that is susceptible of and consumable by fire. It must be evident to every one that the j)hra£C is used