The Latest Infidelity.pdf 487KB May 19 2009 - R.L. Dabney Archive

508 THE LATKST INFIDELITY.
For instance, we are hotly told by one that Joshua must
have been a very wicked man, because he not only punished
Aehan capitally for disobeying a police regulation, but mur-
dered his wife and children along with him. But the old testa-
ment makes Joshua a very pious hero; wherefore it also is a
very wicked and foolish book. The simple and sufficient reply
is, that the execution of Achan's family was none of Joshua's
doings. He had no more discretion about it than about Noah's
flood. God was the agent, and Joshua his merely involuntary
instrument. So that the moral question in the given case re-
solves itself into this: Has Almighty God a right to punish a
contumacious and immoral family of his creatures with death
for a special wise end, deatli being the final just penalty of all
sin? No man, after provisionally admitting the condition of
this question, even for argument's sake, is silly enough to as-
sert that, if there is such a God, such retribution from him
would be necessarily unjust. Or, do they reinforce their cavil
by saying there is no evidence that Achan's wife and children
were accomplices in his theft? The simple reply is, that un-
doubtedly God knew them to be a bad family, worthy on gen-
eral grounds of his eternal displeasure. For the principle of
imputatiDn on which this case proceeds is that God righteous-
ly imputes part of the guilt of wicked parents to children, but
only to wicked children.* So that we are certain the family
also was vicious and disobedient. Had God punished them
some years after with death, or rheumatism, or cholera, nobody
who admits that there is a God, would have dreamed Df im-
pugning the justice of that providential dispensation. Who,
then, can blame the Sovereign Judge if, for the sake of an im-
portant and wise object, he anticipated the deserved punish-
ment and connected it with that of the criminal head of the
family? But I also deny the asserted ground of the cavil, that
persons were punished along with Achan who, however other-
wise sinful, were innocent of his particular breach of military
orders. No doubt they were implicated with him by receiving
and concealing the plunder. The receiver is as bad as the thief.
If there were infants in the family, death removed them to the
bliss of heaven.
•Ex.xx. 6; Ezek. xvlii.