Johannes Wollebius on God's hardening

From Wikipedia:

==Johannes Wolleb (Wollebius) (1589–1629) was a Swiss Protestant theologian. He was a student of Amandus Polanus, and followed in the tradition of a Reformed scholasticism, a formal statement of the views arising from the Protestant Reformation.[1]
 

He was the successor of Johann Jakob Grynaeus at Basel Cathedral. The Compendium Theologiae Christianae of 1626 is his major work; it is shorter than the Syntagma Theologiae Christianae (1609) of Polanus, and served as an abridgement and development. It was translated into English by Alexander Ross, as Abridgement of Christian Divinitie (1650).[2]
 

Wolleb influenced the Westminster Catechisms.[3] His Compendium, with William Ames's Medulla, and Francis Turretin's writings, were used as textbooks into the 18th century and beyond.[4] In the late 17th century, Wolleb's system began to displace Ames's in favour at Harvard University.[5] Students at Yale University in the early 18th century used to study the Abridgement every Friday afternoon;[6] the books by Wolleb and Ames were written into the university Regulations (1745).[7] ==

Wollebius (in effect) walks up to and places his presumptuous finger upon Romans 9:18 and says, "I don't believe this text":

"The hardening of the wicked is ascribed to God as a most just judgment; so as God can neither be blamed as faulty, nor can the wicked be excused.

The wicked are in this inexcusable, because God only hardeneth those who harden themselves;  neither doth he harden the soft-hearted, but in his just judgment he increaseth the hardness of them who were hardened before. ... who so often said of Pharaoh...I will make obstinate, I will harden his heart, For not only doth he harden by permission, but also, 1.  By letting loose the bridle with which he held in their exorbitant lusts ... 2.  By delivering them to Satan as to a Hangman. 1 Kings 22:21-22 ... As therefore when the Magistrate delivers over to the Hangman a guilty person to be punished; he is neither the cause of his wickedness, nor of his destruction:  even so when God gives up wicked men to Satan;  neither is the cause of their wickedness, nor of their ruin to be imputed to God." (Johannes Wollebius, The abridgment of Christian divinitie, pp. 59-61; modernized spelling and underlining mine--CD)