Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 19

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But the difficulties involved in the Augustine theory do not lie in the mode by which it came to pass that all men begin existence with depraved natures, but in the fact, that God, having power to create all minds as perfect as Adam's, and also the power to regenerate all, has chosen not to do so, and thus has preferred the consequent sin and misery to the happiness resulting from making perfect minds.

This grand difficulty stands entirely unrelieved by the above methods. Nay more, they all serve but to increase a sense of the folly and enormity of the awful result, and to present our Maker as the cruel cause of [pg 017] all our miseries, and the fullest and most awful realization of our idea of a perfectly malevolent being.2