‘According to my observation,’ (says Jonathan Edwards, in the preface to his celebrated defence of this doctrine of original sin, itself one of the ablest works, if not the very ablest, on that side of the question) ‘no one book has done so much towards rooting out of these western parts of New England the principles and scheme of religion maintained by our pious and excellent forefathers, the divines and Christians who first settled this country, and alienating the minds of many from what, I think, are evidently some of the main doctrines of the Gospel, as that which Dr. Taylor has published against the doctrine of original sin.’
Answers to this work were, soon after, published by Watts, Jennings, and Wesley; the latter of whom deals in an excess of theological vituperation, to which he has rarely given way on other occasions, branding his opponent with the opprobrious epithets of heretic, deist, and worst than deist! To Watts and Jennings the author replied, in a supplement to the second edition of his Treatise; which contained a very judicious review of the whole controversy, and particularly an acute and unanswerable exposure of the absurdity of the common notion, that Adam was in some sort (as it is expressed in the language of technical theology) the federal head or representative of the whole race of mankind; a notion not less devoid of the shadow of scriptural authority, than it is repugnant to the most obvious principles of reason, equity, and justice.
In 1745 appeared the ‘Paraphrase on the Epistle to the Romans,’1 to which is prefixed,
