try; while, as to the moral look of
it, one has only to ask any decently honourable man, whether, under like
circumstances, he would try to get rid of his responsibility by such a
plea.

Hume's _Inquiry_ appeared in 1748. He does not refer to Anthony Collins'
essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same
question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and
lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two
freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such
theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic
divine, Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey,
produced, in the interests of the straitest orthodoxy, a demonstration
of the necessarian thesis, which has never been equalled in power, and
certainly has never been refuted.

In the ninth section of the fourth part of Edwards' _Inquiry_, he has to
deal with the Arminian objection to the Calvinistic doctrine that "it
makes God the author of sin"; and it is curious to watch the struggle
between the theological controversialist, striving to ward off an
admission which he knows will be employed to damage his side, and the
acute logician, conscious that, in some shape or other, the admission
must be made. Beginning with a _tu quoque_, that the Arminian doctrine
involves consequences as bad as the Calvinistic view, he proceeds to
object to the term "author of sin," though he ends by admitting that, in
a certain sense, it is applicable; he proves from Scripture, that God is
the disposer and orderer of sin; and then, by an elaborate false analogy
with the darkness resulting from the absence of the sun, endeavours to
suggest that he is only the author of it in a negative sense; and,
finally, he takes refuge in the conclusion that, though God is the
orderer and disposer of those deeds which, considered in relation to
their agents, are morally evil, yet, inasmuch as His purpose has all
along been infinitely good, they are not evil relatively to him.

And this, of course, may be perfectly true; but if true, it is
inconsistent with the attribute of omnipotence. It is conceivable that
there should be no evil in the world; that which is conceivable is
certainly possible; if it were possible for evil to be non-existent, the
maker of the world, who, though foreknowing the existence of evil in
that world, did not prevent it, either did not really desire it should
not exist