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der review. No man has proved that choice is always as is the greatest apparent good, and it is not an intuitional idea. Edwards found it in the dialectics of previous periods, and accepted it without special investigation, we may hope. It was, too, a link in a chain and scheme of doctrine. It was not investigated on its intrinsic merits as a psychological question. It stood in the light of a consequence, and was for its sake. It was deemed needful to Divine government, though without good reason. The argument was, that God could not be supreme, or secure results, unless he had sovereignty of all volitions and made them but modifications of the infinite cause. But there never can be more than the "petitio principii” here. You can only beg the question. Who knows that I always do what I think is best? It seems to me far otherwise. The sense of the inquiry is not altered if I add the phrase, what I think at the time is best. All volition is in the present tense. The statement, however expressed, must be tantamount to this, that all men always act from the conviction of what is the greatest good. And can this be said of all the foolishness, and lust, and wickedness of earth and hell? The expression is a misnomer. It does not characterize the act. It has credence for the sake of an end to be gained by it, and yet that end, when thus reached, falsifies a moral government and ignores the distinction between nature and the supernatural.

If motives govern choice, with no power to the contrary, then "the is" is the exponent of "the can be." Then the past could be only as it has been; the present cannot be otherwise than as it is, or the future than as it will be. The forces are all "ab extra." We have no power to alter them, or their effects. The stream is from the beginning downward and onward, and we have no power to change its course. All is a Divine programme, and must be fulfilled in this way or the reins are taken out of the hands of God, and he has no way left to be supreme. It is an outside pressure on us, or one "ab extra" to ourselves, which is only to be yielded to, and which can only be yielded to freely, you may say. But even that you get not from the doctrine, or the scheme it serves,

but in spite of, and in exception to, them. These would be complete, with this element left out. The whole subject is viewed theologically, and for a theological result. It is a mere matter of cause and effect, to enable God to govern mind and secure results in the moral, as he does in the physical world. That the mind is free in the process, at the point of contact with it, is intuitionally learned indeed, but it does not belong to the scheme or the object of it, and does not make one hair white or black, in the matter of results. All is from God, and resistless as the lightning, and all a Divine method to gain a Divine end. And in gaining that end, the mind is no real factor. It has no discretion, no power of resistance, no sovereignty over the issue. At any given point of wrong it could not hold up, for it has no power to the contrary. It goes as it is led, and because it is led. You say freely, "Yes," as the wheel on its axle, or the joint in its socket, or the door on its hinges, and by subsidizing this foreign element to your doctrine you relieve thus empirically the unutterable repulsions of it. But in all this you do not describe the conscious intuitions of the mind in its free acts. The view is not authentic. More is wanting to it. It lacks vitality. It does not give object or character to the freedom it admits. There is in it no discretion, no power of discrimination, no election as to what the act shall be in the given circumstances. You have not got up into the region of personal cause. There is no self-origination of conduct, or character, or destiny. You have not risen into the region of the "supernatural." You have not stept from the tread-mill policy of mere physics into the appropriate sphere of the will. The man as yet is but a mere tool in the hands of another—a thing acting as it is acted on-a means, worked by another for the sake of something beyond itself. And the picture is unmeaning. The view is lame and inadequate. It fails integrally to complete the intimations of consciousness in our free acts, and tantalizes us with the name of freedom, while it takes its gist and import, aye, its real life away, and makes it at once without significance or value.

We never did wrong without the conviction that, at the

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time and under the circumstances, the act was needless and avoidable. Could we, one of the sharpest pangs of remorse would be extracted, if not all remorse effectually quieted and removed. No man was ever placed where he could not do right. A virtue that is "inevitable," is no virtue. The plea, "I could not help it," is always in bar of imputed wrong, and equally excluding merit, in action formally right. Of course we would guard against the predisposing tendencies to existent wrong, which are found in habits and propensities formed and resultant of the earlier history of the individual or the race, and our friends, in controversy, will, we judge, agree with us in this. But if I have no power against an existing temptation and array of motives, how have I against a previous habit? Such a habit is nothing to me now, in the matter of a current responsibility, except as a present influence. And if I have no capabilities concerning it, but only to freely do its bidding-if I may not at any stage, and under any circumstances, arrest and throttle it and deliver myself from it, and proclaim the freedom of eternal victory over it, from the force of the very elements of the intelligence that is in me, and of me as a creature of God, and more especially now as aided and encouraged by the assurances of the gospel, then indeed am I "led as an ox to the slaughter, and like a fool to the correction of the stocks."

But it has been objected "cui bono," "What is the use of claiming the power of contrary choice-it never is exercised?" But are you sure of that? We believe that the power of contrary choice is, and is exercised in thousands and thousands of instances every day. Indeed, not a sinner turns to God without it. Let a great revival of religion sweep through the city, and over the land, and you have it everywhere. We see not how any one gets to Christ without it. He must wake it up, and stake his salvation, under God, upon it. He must summon it to the work of resistance and counteraction. He must contravene the prevalent propensities, and temptations, and habits of a whole life of impenitence and alienation from God. He must encounter the cherished lusts of a life time, and go right abreast of all he has ever been, to resist all, and against the pleadings, and pretensions, and tyranny of all, and turn

unto God and live. And in this he needs the power of contrary choice, and uses it. So that for all the purposes of this discussion this power to the contrary is, under God, the life of the world, and is seen wherever a sinner is converted from the error of his way, or a soul saved from death. How can you break away from a dominant propensity, or change a course of action, without calling up an element of being like that for which we here contend?

The objector will not surely take shelter under the poor subterfuge that we cannot have two and opposite choices, or go two ways at once; for what does this amount to, reduced to the last analysis? It is just equivalent to the insignificant, identical proposition, that we do as we do-that personality is a unit, and not a duad. A given volition or exercise may be no measure of the powers of its author. Powers may lie dormant, or await the occasion for their use. We should be wrong, is exer

sorry to conclude that one who is only doing cising all the powers he has, or that we ever lose the power of right action, whatever, in fact, our conduct may be.

The poor deceit practised on the mind of such an objector, and which he would doubtless hold as a conceded and legitimate postulate, and which has been the occasion of more discussions and logomachics since its invention than almost anything else, is that of two sorts of necessity-physical and moral-the last always retiring, on the analysis of its friends, into a mere certainty, only. But how is the merely certain a correlate of the possible? Only by begging the question. again, in view of the theological necessities of the scheme. A certainty may be no more allied to a necessity than an uncertainty, unless, as before, you restrict the thought to the mere inanity, that what will be, will be. But much will be that need not be, and that ought not to be, and that is under no necessity of being whatever. Shall we use a nomenclature, in dealing with abstract truth, which obliges us to say that that is necessary which God has forbidden, and which he is opposed to, and all good agencies in the universe, and the constituent elements of our own being? Temptation is one thing, but the necessity of compliance quite another. I may be greatly tempted, but the greater is the resistance, and the

use of my power to the contrary, which I can and should make; and if I foolishly comply, the fact would be the exponent of no necessity thereto. Of course we object not to the forms of conventional speech, found in or out of the Bible, and for popular use, where great temptation or a perpetuated depravity is correllated with, or expressed by the words can," and "cannot;" as, the brethren of Joseph hated him so badly that they "could not speak peaceably to him;" when every one knows they could and should.

The error lies not in accepting this metaphoric language of the Orient and of common life, as implying hardened iniquity, or in reference to hereditary propensity, or great, overt wickedness, as when it is said that such an one is so great a liar that he "cannot" speak the truth, and the like phrases that are well enough understood among men-not this, but in running this phraseology into a universal dogma of Occidental metaphysics, and constituting it a battery in the discussions of exact truth and science behind which to screen the exigences of a theological system. But the doctrine is vital to the theory which it subserves. The aim is to secure a Divine government in the moral sphere. And to secure this, it is deemed needful to give to God the sovereignty of all volitions, that they may thereby be as on the whole he would have them to be, and as will best promote his great end in creation. And as this can be done only in the way of influence "ab extra" to the mind, (proper,) there is established from the very demands of the system this doctrine of necessity, and the coalescence of the "is" and the " can be." The error lies in bringing in this idea of necessity at all within the sphere of the will, and in taking this way of securing a Divine moral government. It is inherently vicious as a method, and can but subvert the superstructure it would raise. What, in the convictions of any man, would be the value of, or what would be that moral government or universe which absorbed into the Deity all the sovereignty of volitions, and found in him alone all the discretionary movements of mind? A thing, it might be; more than that, it could not be.

The doctrine of cause is as legitimate and appreciable in derived as underived being. God made man in his own image,

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