By Rev. ARCH. BEATON, Gairloch.
IN view of the fact that the saintly Reformers, Puritan divines, Scottish Covenants, American divines and theologians, as well as the Evangelical divines of the Scottish Highlands, ardently believed and held fast, the truth of the general call, or free offer of the Gospel, it seems bordering on dictatorial arrogance on the part of present-day Hyper-Calvinists to describe as “Scripturally-unwarranted” that precious truth. To denounce, in the face of such sanctified scholarship, all who hold to the free offer, or general call of the Gospel, together with particular redemption, as: “Scripturally-inconsistent and Arminian,” is to over-leap all bounds of propriety and sobriety.
The Rev. Principal Cunningham, the great Scottish theologian, in his own masterly way, has Scripturally and logically, disposed of many of the plausible arguments of the Hyper-Calvinists and showed that no one has the right to limit the Most High to only one particular aspect of His purpose in calling on men generally, in such language as: “Look unto me, all ye ends of the earth, and be ye saved, for I am God and there is none else,” as if none was addressed but the elect.
As so much has been written and said about this subject lately, however, we purpose here to confine ourselves to the words of the Rev. A. Moody Stuart, in reference to the Calvinism of Mr. Brownlow North, as in our view typical of the views on the subject held by Free Presbyterians and other Calvinists to-day. “His Calvinism did not in any way hamper him in declaring the freest offer of salvation to all, and pressing its instant acceptance upon every sinner to whom the offer came. The salvation he preached was as free as the sunlight, as authoritatively pressed on every Gospel hearer as the august command of God can press it, and as urgent as it can be made by the exactest meaning of the word now. Sufficient for all, pressed upon the immediate acceptance of all, by the invitation, the entreaty, and the command of God, such was his Gospel—and can anything be more free, more full and more unfettered? No doubt he also insisted on the natural aversion to it, inability to understand it, and incapacity to receive it. But over and against this, he held an offer and gift of the Holy Spirit as free as the offer and gift of the Saviour, thoroughly to overcome that aversion, to remove the blindness of the understanding and the alienation of the affections—an omnipotent Spirit waiting to be bestowed on all who asked. Human language cannot express a salvation more overflowingly full and more unconditionally free:—God offering His Spirit to lost and helpless sinners as freely and unconditionally as He offers His Son.”