Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 35

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The Princeton Reviewers, in opposing the Catholic mode, as defended by Dr. Woods, say:

“How is it to be reconciled with the divine character that the fate of unborn millions should depend on an act over which they had not the slightest control, and in which they had no agency? This difficulty presses the opponents of the doctrine (of imputation) more heavily than its advocates. God must produce such results either on the ground of justice or of sovereignty. The defenders of imputation take the ground of justice—their opponents that of sovereignty.

“Is it more congenial with the unsophisticated moral feelings of men that God, out of his mere sovereignty, should determine that because one man sinned all men should sin, that because one man forfeited his favor all men should incur his curse, or because one man sinned all should be born with a contaminated moral nature, than that, in virtue of a most benevolent constitution by which one was made the representative of the race, the punishment of the one should come upon all?”

That is to say, they affirm interrogatively that imputing [pg 032] sins to innocent beings that they never committed, as the ground of penal inflictions, is a better defense of God from the charge of being the author of sin and of cruel injustice than the Catholic mode of sovereignty and mystery. At the same time they discard the constitutional transmission mode of Andover and New Haven.

The following from President Edwards the younger, gives the argument of a constitutional transmission divine against the imputation mode.