The crowning indictment of the old religion, culminating in William Ellery Channing's 1820 essay, "The Moral Argument against Calvinism," was that it undermined incentives to do good and thus stood in the way of social improvement and the "progress of the human mind." By insisting on man's "natural incapacity," preachers who dwelled on original sin effectively absolved sinners of any responsibility for their actions. Yet they painted a lurid picture of the punishments awaiting sinners in the next world, seemingly unaware of the "primary and fundamental principle" that "natural incapacity absolves from guilt." They libeled both man, by denying his free will, and God, by endowing him with qualities that "shock our ideas of rectitude." If parents brought their children into the world totally depraved and then pursued them with "endless punishment," everyone would condemn such cruelty out of hand. "Were a sovereign to incapacitate his subjects ... for obeying his laws, and then to torture them in dungeons of perpetual woe, we should say, that history records no darker crime." But when challenged to explain how the same injustice became just when attributed to God, Edwards's followers took refuge in obscurantism. Human beings, they said, must not sit in judgment of God.
Why not?—Channing wanted to know. God's attributes were perfectly "intelligible," his justice the same as his creatures'. Human conceptions of right and wrong, though "learned from our nature" (the only source from which they could possibly be learned), were quite adequate to the job of judging God: and the God of Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Hopkins, and Joseph Bellamy stood convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors. The pretense that human beings could form no reliable ideas of this unfathomable tyrant was an "affected humility." Why should we "prostrate ourselves before mere power"?
Since Calvinism assigned "unworthy views" of morality to God, it was
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