Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 40

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“This natural propagation of sinful inclinations from a common parent, by a law of creation, seems difficult to be reconciled with the goodness and justice of God. It seems exceeding hard to suppose that such a righteous and holy God, the Creator, who is also a being of such infinite goodness, should, by a powerful law and order of creation, which is now called nature, appoint young, intelligent creatures to come into being in such unhappy and degenerate circumstances, liable to such intense pains and miseries, and under such powerful tendencies and propensities to evil, by the mere law of propagation, as should almost unavoidably expose them to ten thousand actual sins, and all this before they have any personal sin or guilt to deserve it.

“If it could be well made out that the whole race of mankind are partakers of sinful inclinations, and evil passions, and biases to vice, and also are exposed to many sharp actual sufferings and to death, merely and only by the original divine law of propagation from their parents who had sinned; and, if the justice and goodness of God could be vindicated in making and maintaining such a dreadful law or order of propagation through six thousand years, we have no need of further inquiries, but might here be at rest. But, if the scheme be so injurious to the goodness and equity of God as it seems to be, then we are constrained to seek a little further for a satisfactory account of this universal degeneracy and misery of mankind.”

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The following was written by an American divine at the time of the commencement of the conflict in this country between the Old and New School Calvinists. At that time this theory of a depraved nature was accompanied, even in pulpit teachings, by the assumption of man's total inability to do any thing to gain salvation, and that Christ died, not for all men, but only for “the elect.”