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. 1804 edition. Excerpt: ...a situation, would not have produced the desired effects. Nothing could teach them like experience: And, indeed, this is evidently the case so universally, that it is even become a proverb, that experience is the best schoal-master; so that it seems plain that intelligences, as they were at first created, were not in proper circumstances to be confirmed: nor could God have confirmed them, with that honor to himself that was desirable and fit. For, if God, the only immutable Being, of his own. infinite goodness and sovereign grace, should shew Buch a kindness to any of his creatures, it was fit and desirable that they should be thoroughly sensible of the greatness and freeness of his grace. The kindness done to a mutable, peccable creature, in such a case, as to the matter of it, must be of infinite worth--it being a confirmation in everlasting happiness. And aa the kindness in confirming a peccable creature must be infinitely great, so the grace must be absolutely free. God had done so much for all intelligences in their first creation, that he was under no obligations to do any more: He was absolutely at liberty i tie looked up-. Si on it in this light-And had he, to what he had originally done for them as their Creator, super-added confirming grace, i.e. undertaken, as their guardian, to have been their constant keeper, and engaged his own immutability to have rendered them immutably good, the favor had been quite over and above what was due from the Creator to his creature; and so had been, in a peculiar sense, free. Now, for a favor, infinitely great, and so absolutely free, to be conferred in such a manner as that the greatness andfreeness of it should never have been seen by intelligences, was neither for the honor of God, nor for...