Читать книгу An Appeal to the People in Behalf of Their Rights as Authorized Interpreters of the Bible - Catharine Esther Beecher - Страница 44

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“I acknowledge my inability (I would say it reverently) to admit this belief together with a belief in the divine goodness—the belief that ‘God is love,’ that his tender mercies are over all his works. Goodness, benevolence, charity, as ascribed in supreme perfection to him, can not mean a quality foreign to all human conceptions of goodness. It must be something analogous in principle to what himself has defined and required as goodness in his moral creatures, that, in adoring the divine goodness, we may not be worshiping an ‘unknown God.’ But, if so, how would all our ideas be confounded while contemplating him bringing, of his own sovereign will, a race of creatures into existence in such a condition that they certainly will and must—must by their nature and circumstances—go wrong and be miserable, unless prevented by especial grace, which is the privilege of only a small portion of them, and at the same time affixing on their delinquency a doom of which it is infinitely beyond the highest archangel's faculty to apprehend a thousandth part of the horror.

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“It amazes me to imagine how thoughtful and benevolent men, believing that doctrine, can endure the sight of the present world and the history of the past. To behold successive, innumerable crowds carried on in the mighty impulse of a depraved nature, which they are impotent to reverse, and to which it is not the will of God, in his sovereignty, to apply the only adequate power, the withholding of which consigns them inevitably to their doom; to see them passing through a short term of moral existence (absurdly sometimes denominated a probation) under all the world's pernicious influences, with the addition of the malign and deadly one of the great tempter and destroyer, to confirm and augment the inherent depravity, on their speedy passage to everlasting woe;—I repeat, I am, without pretending to any extraordinary depth of feeling, amazed to conceive what they contrive to do with their sensibility, and in what manner they maintain a firm assurance of the divine goodness and justice.”

The following is the experience of the author of the Conflict of Ages: