Henry Rogers

Quotes From

“An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jonathan Edwards” (1834)

• The concentration of the faculties on some one object is indispensably necessary to profound investigation; and on the contrary, the diffusion of the faculties over a large surface is, generally speaking, absolutely inseparable from a comparatively superficial knowledge.#
• The complexity of the universe is the complexity not so much of distinct principles of existence, as of relations, combinations, and modes.#
• Moral actions take their complexion solely from the nature of the motives which produce them, while actions which spring from no motive at all, even though prompted by a self-determining power, are sufficiently dignified by the name of folly.#
• There never was an instance of an Arminian who did not, like every body else, think that he was perfectly right in pronouncing men virtuous or vicious precisely in proportion to the strength and inveteracy of inclination and habit; and in resenting injury, not a whit the less in compassion to that desperate malignity of the passions which had inflicted it.#
• The real difficulty [with the doctrine of original sin] is not to reconcile the imputation of sin and guilt where there is no sin and guilt at all, (for that is not the case supposed,) but to vindicate the reasonableness of a constitution by which one being becomes depraved by his dependence on another who is so, or by which the moral condition of one being is remotely determined by the moral condition of another.#
• Actions are denominated virtuous or vicious, from their motives, not from their tendencies; tendencies that are not perceived, or not felt at the time of action, never determine the moral character of the action. If such a rule of moral judgment were for an instant admitted, many an action would become virtuous which the world had never suspected of being as such; nay, for ought we can tell, all moral evil itself might be found in the end to be so.#
• Gold must at least glitter, although all that glitters is not gold.#