emories; the
earnest young theologian, exploring with awe the mountainous debris of
their controversial lore, ponders over the colossal thoughts entombed
therein, as he would over the gigantic fossils of an early creation, and
endeavors in vain to recall to the skeleton abstractions before him the
warm and vigorous life wherewith they were once clothed; but
Hopkinsianism, as a distinct and living school of philosophy, theology,
and metaphysics, no longer exists. It has no living oracles left; and
its memory survives only in the doctrinal treatises of the elder and
younger Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, and Emmons.

It is no part of our present purpose to discuss the merits of the system
in question. Indeed, looking at the great controversy which divided New
England Calvinism in the eighteenth century, from a point of view which
secures our impartiality and freedom from prejudice, we find it
exceedingly difficult to get a precise idea of what was actually at
issue. To our poor comprehension, much of the dispute hinges upon names
rather than things; on the manner of reaching conclusions quite as much
as upon the conclusions themselves. Its origin may be traced to the
great religious awakening of the middle of the past century, when the
dogmas of the Calvinistic faith were subjected to the inquiry of acute
and earnest minds, roused up from the incurious ease and passive
indifference of nominal orthodoxy. Without intending it, it broke down
some of the barriers which separated Arminianism and Calvinism; its
product, Hopkinsianism, while it pushed the doctrine of the Genevan
reformer on the subject of the Divine decrees and agency to that extreme
point where it well-nigh loses itself in Pantheism, held at the same time
that guilt could not be hereditary; that man, being responsible for his
sinful acts, and not for his sinful nature, can only be justified by a
personal holiness, consisting not so much in legal obedience as in that
disinterested benevolence which prefers the glory of God and the welfare
of universal being above the happiness of self. It had the merit,
whatever it may be, of reducing the doctrines of the Reformation to an
ingenious and scholastic form of theology; of bringing them boldly to the
test of reason and philosophy. Its leading advocates were not mere
heartless reasoners and closet speculators. They taught that sin was
selfishness, and holiness self-denying benevolence, and they endeavored
to pract