[OrthodoxPresbyterian]

I stand corrected. I have my own copy, however, and Ralston abridged it. The full text is less open to your attacks. Book III, lines 103-128:

I'll agree that the Full Text is less open to my attacks.

But at best -- that excuses Milton of the charge of Heresy, not Ralston.

You would have us accept the argument of a Heretic who butchered John Milton's Paradise Lost into a Denial of God's Foreknowledge of the Fall of Man... and then had the audacity to call his HERETICAL mutilation of Milton "a most beautiful commentary" in support of his thesis!!

[The Grammarian]

You would have us accept the argument of a Heretic who butchered John Milton's Paradise Lost into a Denial of God's Foreknowledge of the Fall of Man... and then had the audacity to call his HERETICAL mutilation of Milton "a most beautiful commentary" in support of his thesis!!

Actually, you're putting far too much stress on Ralston's quotation of Paradise Lost. Ralston never denied God's foreknowledge, and his excerpt from Paradise Lost was not intended to even make God's foreknowledge an issue. Note: 1) the title of the chapter, "The Moral Agency of Man," and 2) that excerpt from P.L. was primarily aimed at supporting the statement at the end of the excerpt that "they themselves ordained their fall," which was, itself, cited in support of the chapter's thesis that man is possessed of moral free agency.