do great injustice to Mr. Baxter, however, if we should suppose that he believed in nothing more than this relative Trinity. He believed that this relation of attributes is involved in the Trinity, but something additional is also involved in it. His “End of Controversy" contains such remarks as the following, and these tend to modify somewhat the impression made by the preceding quotations:

"But though I am past doubt that in God is this Trinity of essential, formal, inadequate conceptions or primalities, and that the impress of them is on the soul of man, which is his image, and on the whole frame of nature and grace; yet far be it from me to say that nothing else is meant by the Trinity of Persons. Thus much we are sure of: there may be more to constitute that personality than is to us comprehensible; and I doubt not but there is more, because thus much is so intelligible; seeing the Divine nature is so infinitely far above the comprehension of us poor worms. But what we know not we cannot describe or notify to others.”1

Indeed, so deeply penetrated was the mind of Baxter with the mysteriousness of the Trinity; so confident was he that the Trinity is something altogether above and beyond a mere relation of the Divine attributes and acts, that, in his "End of Controversy," he does not even venture to oppose Dr. Henry More's opinion, "that from the prime Being emaneth-or is createdthe Con, which is the second hypostasis or person, and matter which is the third" hypostasis, and thus the Trinity consists in "the prime entity, the life and the matter, being the Father, Son and Holy Ghost." Once he published a treatise against that doctrine, "but," he says in his "End of Controversy," "on further consideration, I am very loth to be so venturous in a case of such tremendous mystery, as to meddle for or against [Dr. More's theory]. lest etiam vera dicere de Deo si incerta, sit periculosum." 2 He did not adopt More's notion; he continued to deem it unsound; but he was not so confident of its falsity as to hazard a renewed argument against it. He did not believe the world to be the eternal effect of an eternal cause; yet, in his distrust of human speculations, he says: "The difficulty of the controversy [on the eternal duration of the world] doth deter me from meddling with it, lest I be blinded by presuming too nearly to gaze on the light that should guide me, and God, that is love, should for my boldness be to me a consuming fire. Things

1 Chap. II. §§ 27, 24.

2 Ib. § 28.

revealed only are for our search." While searching them for the reasonableness of the Trinity, this metaphysical divine was by no means disposed to make the doctrine simply rationalistic,

§2. The Divine Government.

After all the disputes which our veteran controversialist had conducted on the subject of the Divine government, it is interesting to notice the manner in which he discusses the subject when he describes himself as "under the sentence of death, in expectation of [his] my approaching change."

He represents the decrees of God as God himself decreeing; as no distinct substance, no accidents of the Most High, but as his essential will in a certain state. According to Baxter's favorite mode of speaking: "Man in esse cognito was nothing but God himself." God's knowledge of future events was not derived from his decrees, but is his essential attribute, or rather is himself essentially knowing. He perceives future events directly, just as we perceive present events. His decrees respect his own acts. Whatever he does, that he determined to do; and he does not determine what he does not effect. He does effect much in relation to sin; "much without which sin could not be (as the life and power of the sinners, his abused mercies, objects, etc.). Therefore, all this he decreed to do, even as his own works, which sinners make the occasions of their sin.” 2 As the "End of Controversy" does not allow the propriety of saying that God decreed our transgressions, so (unlike some previous works of Baxter) it does not appear to sanction so much as the expression that he decreed the certainty of our transgressions. "If those be in the right (as most) that think sin is nothing (no more than death or darkness) you will grant that God decreed it not;"- this is one of his expressions indicating his tendency to favor the scholastic representation that sin is a nonentity. "Where there is no effect or object of God's will, there is no such will to be named and asserted. But so much as God effecteth in or towards man's damnation, so much he must be said to will. God effecteth no man's sin, and therefore he willed not or decreed not to effect it." So far as to permit sin means not to hinder it, then God did not decree to permit it, for

1 Chap. II. § 29.

2 Chap. VI. § 6.

8 Ib. §§ 3, 4.

the not hindering of sin is above negation, "a mere nothing," and God does not decree a mere nothing. And if it would hold that God decreeth his permission of sin, it followeth not that he decreeth the sin permitted; for that is not a capable object of his volition." All the punishments which God inflicts upon sinners, he decrees to inflict; but where the withholding of spiritual favors is not a punishment, there it is not an act of reprobation, and so far as it is a mere withholding, a simple negation or privation, it "is nothing, and so as nothing not the object of a positive decree."

"By all this it appeareth that election and reprobation go not pari passu, or are not equally ascribed to God. For in election God is the cause of the means of salvation by his grace, and of all that truly tendeth to procure it. But on the other side, God is no cause of any sin which is the means and merit of damnation; nor the cause of damnation, but on the supposition of man's sin. So that sin is foreseen in the person decreed to damnation (but not caused), seeing the decree must be denominated from the effect and object. But in election God decreeth to give us his grace, and be the chief cause of all our holiness, and doth not elect us to salvation on foresight that we will do his will, or be sanctified by ourselves without him. Therefore, Augustine, Prosper and Fulgentius still make this difference, that the decree of damnation goeth on foresight of sin, but the decree of salvation containeth a decree to give that grace that shall certainly save us.

The views of Baxter with regard to the Providence of God, are in harmony with his views respecting the Divine purposes. Every consistent thinker will adopt a theory of the eternal decrees, which corresponds with the theory concerning the method in which those decrees are carried out. Baxter differed from the Calvinists on the subject of Divine Providence, as much as on that of the plan which Providence executes. Turretin and his school make a broad distinction between God's determining sinners to their acts, as acts, and to their acts as sinful. "Illa [praemotio Dei] tantum pertinet ad actiones; quatenus materialiter et entative se habent, non vero moraliter; id. ad actus substantiam, sed non ad ejus malitiam.” "Cum in omni actione morali necessario distinguenda sit substantia actus in genere entis, ab ejusdem bonitate vel malitia in genere moris, actio intelligendi et volendi simpliciter, quae habet rationem materialis, ab actione intelligendi et volendi hoc vel illud objectum licitum

1 Chap. VI. § 7.

2 Ib. 15.

vel illicitum, quae habet rationem formalis; patet nullam actionem posse dici essentialiter bonam vel malam, sed tantum prout est hic et nunc circumstantiata in genere moris, id. cum oxέoɛ ad hoc vel illud objectum morale bonum vel malum." And Turretin teaches often, that we may regard the Deity as the cause of the action considered simply as such, in the matter of it, although he is not the cause of the action considered as evil, in the form of it. This is denied by Baxter, who insists in his "End of Controversy," that as God is not "the willer," so he is in no sense the cause of depraved actions. He writes:

"To say, that God is the principal determining cause of every sinful act with all its objects and circumstances (called the materiale peccati), and also the cause of the law that forbiddeth it, and the person that committeth it, is to make him the chief cause of sin, as far as it is capable of a cause, even of the formal cause. To say, that such a cause is the cause only of the act but not of the obliquity, is absurd; because the obliquity is a relation necessarily resulting from the law and act with all its modes and circumstances; and the obliquity can have no other cause. To say, that God willeth and loveth and causeth sin, not as sin, but for good ends and uses, is to say no more for God, than may be said for wicked men, if not for devils; save only that God's ends are better than theirs. To say, that God willeth not sin, but the existence and futurity of sin, is but as aforesaid to say, that he wills not sin as sin, or sub ratione mali, but that it exist for better ends; or else it is a contradiction; for to will or cause sin is nothing else but to will and cause the existence of sin. They that say, that God willeth the existence of sin as it is summe conducibile to the glory of his justice and mercy (yea, and that per se, and not per accidens) do wrong the glory of God's holiness and wisdom. A physician can love his own skill and compassion, and the honor that cometh to him by curing a disease, without loving or willing the disease itself, but only supposing it as an evil which he can turn to good.”.

Mr. Baxter persevered in advocating the principle, that God administers the affairs of his natural universe by second causes, and, while God upholds these causes and their efficiency, they occasion the phenomena of the universe without any other than that preserving operation of God. "Let unbiassed reason judge," he writes, "whether, if a rock should be held up in the air, if God continue the natural gravity of it, with all the rest of the frame of nature, could not that rock fall, without another motion which is without any second cause, to thrust it down." All

1 Op. Loc. VI. Quaest. V. §§ 16, 17.

Chap. VII. § 13.

2 Chap. VIII. §§ 2—6.

are agreed," he adds, "that there is no less of God in the operations done by second causes or nature, than in immediate operations, without second causes. God is as much in the one as in the other." So far, indeed, does Mr. Baxter carry his principle of second causes, that "it is hard for" him "in most miracles to say that God doth more than" cause one "natural agent to resist, turn back or overcome another." He supposes that, as "God hath a rank of free agents that act arbitrarily," these superhuman agents may be commissioned by the Most High to perform miracles, and even that some of these miracles may have been performed by evil spirits. When thus performed, however, they are controlled in their influence by opposing and superior miracles, as the wonders of the Egyptian magicians were overruled for the Divine glory by means of the greater wonders wrought by the hand of Moses.

3. Free Moral Agency.

On this subject, the last theological treatise of Baxter is, perhaps, more definite than his preceding treatises, but corroborates their main doctrine, and condenses it into a more self-consistent form.

In the first place, the "End of Controversy" reaffirms the dogma, that man has a natural power to do all that is required of him by a just God. It gives unequivocal evidence that its author adhered to the same forms of thought and of speech which are noticed in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. IX. p. 150. He has anticipated on this theme many of the distinctions usually ascribed to President Edwards. He speaks not seldom of our natural "powers or faculties," as if he would define the word "power" by the word "faculty;" but it is evident that he here uses the word "faculty" as that which can perform the specified act. He does not mean by it an incompetent faculty, an incapable capacity, which is in fact a mere incapacity. He means what Dr. Owen (inconsistently with himself) calls "the suitableness and proportionableness of the faculties of the soul." He speaks habitually of the "free-will," the "self-determining" and "selfdetermined will." Language does not allow a more definite

1 Chap. VII. § 13.

2 Chap. XIV. §§ 26-28. On p. xxxii, Baxter says that "almost all the matter of faith is above the reason of ignorant sots," as this reason is "dispositive and