Dr. Whelpley.
Reading edition
“The idea that all the numerous millions of Adam's posterity deserve the ineffable and endless torments of hell for a single act of his, before any one of them existed, is repugnant to that reason that God has given us, and is subversive of all possible conceptions of justice. I hesitate not to say, that no scheme of religion ever propagated amongst men contains a more monstrous, a more horrible tenet. The atrocity of this doctrine is beyond comparison. The visions of the Koran, the fictions of Sadder, the fables of the Zendavesta, all give place to this; Rabbinical legends, Brahminical vagaries, all vanish before it.”
“The whole of their doctrine, then, amounts to this: that a man is in the first place condemned, incapacitated, and eternally reprobated for the sin of Adam; in the next place, that he is condemned over again for not doing what he is totally and in all respects unable to do; and in the third place that he is condemned, doubly and trebly condemned, for not believing in a Saviour who never died for him, and with whom he has no more to do than a fallen angel.”
The elder President Adams at first designed to enter the clerical profession, but was deterred by doctrinal difficulties, of which he thus writes: