Objections to the Edwardian Theory. The fatal consequences of this view of the nature of preservation were presented under the head of Providence. All that need be here remarked, is, —
1. That it proceeds upon the assumption that we can under- stand the relation of the efficiency of God to the effects pro- duced in time. Because every new effect which we produce is due to a new exercise of our efficiency, it is assumed that such must be the case with God. He, however, inhabits eter- nity. With him there is no distinction between the past and future. All things are equally present to Him. As we exist in time and space, all our modes of thinking are conditioned by these circum- stances of our being. But as God is not subject to the limitations of time or space, we have no right to transfer these limitations to Hill). This only proves that we cannot understand how God [)ro- duces successive effects. We do not know that it is by successive acts, and therefore it is most unreasonable and presumptuous to make that assumption the ground of explaining great Scriptural doctrines. It is surely just as conceivable or intelligible that God should will the continuous existence of the things which He creates, as that He should create them anew at every successive moment.
2. This doctrine of a continued creation destroys the Scriptural and common sense distinction between creation and preservation. The two are constantly presented as different, and they are re- garded as different by the common judgment of mankind. By creation, God calls things into existence, and by preservation He upholds them in being. The two ideas are essentially distinct. Any theory, therefore, which confounds them must be fallacious. God wills that the things which He has created shall continue to be ; and to deny that He can cause continuous existence is to deny his omnipotence.
3. This doctrine denies the existence of substance. The idea of substance is a primitive idea. It is given in the constitution of our nature. It is an intuitive truth, as is proved by its universal- ity and necessity. One of the essential elements of that idea is uninterrupted continuity of being. Substance is that which stands ; which remains unchanged under all the phenomenal mutations to which it is subjected. According to the theory of continued crea- tion there is and can be no created substance. God is the only substance in the universe. Everything out of God is a series of new effects : there is nothino- which has continuous existence, and therefore there is no substance.
220 PART n. Cii. \TIL — SIN.
4. It necessarily follows that if God is the onlj substance He is the only agent in the universe. All things out of God being every moment called into being out of nothing, are resolved into modes of God's efficiency. If He creates the soul every successive instant, He creates all its states, thoughts, feelings, and volitions. The soul is only a series of divine acts. And therefore there can be no free agency, no sin, no responsibility, no individual existence. The universe is oidy the self-manifestation of God. This doctrine, therefore, in its consequences, is essentially pantheistic.
5. In resolving all identity into an " arbitrary constitution of God," it denies that there is any real identity in any created things. Edwards expressly says. They are not numerically the same. They cannot be the same with an absolute identity. They are one only because God so regards them, and because they are alike, so that we look upon them as the same. This being the case, there seems to be no foundation even for guilt and pollution in the indi- vidual soul as flowing from its own acts, because there is nothing but an apparent, not a real connection between the present and the past in the life of the soul. It is not the same soul that is guilty to-day of the sin committed yesterday. Much less can such an arbitrary or assumed and merely apparent identity between Adam and his race be a just ground of their bearing the guilt of his first sin. In short, this doctrine subverts all our ideas. It assumes that things which, as the human soul, are really one, are not one in the sense of numerical sameness ; and that things which are not identi- cal, as Adam and his posterity, are one in the same sense that the soul of a man is one, or that identity can be predicated of any creature. This doctrine, therefore, which would account for the guilt and native depraA^ity of men on the assumption of an arbitrary divine constitution of God, by which beings which are really distinct subsistences are declared to be one, is not only contrary to the Scriptures and to the intuitive convictions of men, but it affords no satisfactory solution of the facts which it is intended to explain. It does not bring home to any human conscience that the sin of Adam was his sin in the sense in which our sins of yesterday are our guilt of to-day.
The Proper Realistic Theory. The strange doctrine of Edwards, above stated, agrees with the realistic theory so far as that he and the realists unite in saying that Adam and his race are one in the same sense in which a tree is one during its whole progress from the germ to maturity, or in which the human soul is one during all the different periods of its