A Vindication of Strictures on the Origin of Moral Evil (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1808 edition. Excerpt: ...accountability with respect to those actions in which the agent was subjected to it. But the operation of an inherent and eJJ'ential principle of defectability, attaching by " absolute "necefsity" to all created existence, must be uniform, constant, and invariable, extending to all the actions in which the agent is relinquished to its influence. If, therefore, in the original and probationary state of intelligent beings, this influence " infallibly" led some of them to sin, then the blame could not attach to them, but to that principle which Mr. H. asserts to be the true cause of sin, or rather, (dreadful as the consequence is) to that Being who relinquished them to its inevitable operation. And if, as Mr. H. further observes, the immediate producing cause of sin be not " immoral" but " innocent," the effect must also be innocent, and free from all immorality ox turpitude in a moral view. Thus the hypothesis, in the farmer view, imputes the criminality of sin to the Divine Being himself, and in the latter, virtually denies the exislence, and even the possibility of Moral Evil in any proper fense of the phrase; for if sm be the result of a natural desectabdity, or unavoidable necessity of created exislence, then it can, according to this view of its origin, be nothing more than a natural or physical infirmity. Do not the above considerations indubitubly prove, that Dr. W's hypothesis involves not only a denial of moral liberty, but of all accountability; that it would not have been equity, but gross injustice, to leave creatures in these circumltances at their creation; and and consequently that she arguments advanced on these points in the Strictures, page 57 to 64, are fully vindicated? That...