in a sense quite diverse from their original and proper meaning, and their use in common speech, and that such a necessity as attends the acts of men's wills is more properly called certainty than necessity, it being no other than the certain connection between the sub- ject and predicate of ti)e proposition which affirms their existence." It is asserted by many that Ed- wards makes no distinction between the will and the sensibilities; it is thought by some that he does mako a distinction ; the acts of the will being acts of moral choice, the processes of the sensibilities being what he elsewhere terms '■'■natural or animal feelings or affec- tions.''''
During his virtual banishment to the Stockbridge wilderness he wrote another of his more noted works, entitled The great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin defended, etc. The work was finished May 26, 1757, but was not published until 1758, several months after his death. Perhaps the distinctive peculiaritj' of this treatise is his defence of the doctrine that there was a constituted oneness or identity of Adam and his poster- ity;" that they constituted, "as it were, one complex person, or one moral whole ;" that as a tree, when a centurj' old, is one plant with the little sprout from which it grew — as the body of a man, when forty years old, is one with the infant body from which it grew — ■ as the body and soul are one with eacli other, so there is a divine " constitution" according to which Adam and his posterity are '■'■looked upon as one, and dealt witli accordingl}' ;" that in his descendants ^'•Wm first existing of a corrupt disposition is not to be looked upon as sin belonging to them, distinct from their participa- tion in Adam's first sin;" that "the guilt a man lias upon his soul at his first existence is one and simple, viz. the guilt of the original apostasy, the guilt of the sin by which the species first rebelled against God. This, and the guilt arising from the first corruption or depraved disposition of the heart, are not to be looked upon as two things distinctly imputed and charged upon men in the sight of God," but are one and the same thing, according to an arbitrary constitution, like that which causes the continued identity of a river which is constanth' flowing, or of an animal body which is constantly fluctuating. "When I call this an arbitrary constitution, I mean that it is a constitu- tion which depends on nothing but the divine will, which divine will depends on nothing but the divine ■wisdom.'''' During his retirement at Stockbridge, Ed- wards wrote his Dissertatiim concerning the End for wliich God created the World, and also his Dissertation concerning the Nature of true Virtue. On the former of these treatises he had expended much, and on tlie latter a life-long study. One class of his interpreters suppose that he wrote the first of these treatises with the design, and that the treatise has been followed with the result, of modifying the popular aspect of Calvinism, and of thereby removing some of tlie pop- ular objections to the SAstem as formerly held. Tliey suppose that he designed to make the sovereignty of God appear the more amiable by showing that it is in- tent on the highest interests of his creatures ; that the glory of God and the well-being of the universe are one and the same thing, and therefore, wlien God is said to govern the universe for his own glory, he is also said to govern it for its own well-being. In the second of the two last - named treatises, a treatise which, like the first, and like many of his other essays, was designed to reconcile reason witli faith — a treatise the rudiments of which were written in his boyhood, and are found scattered through many of his published works — he reduces all moral goodness to "the love of lieing in general," and this love he considers an act of the will as distinct from "animal or natural feeling." Tliose Calviuistic divines who believe that all the vir- tues, such as faith, justice, etc., are in tlieir nature ac- tive, and are mere forms of benevolence, and that all sin is equally active, and is the elective preference of
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