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Updated: June 26, 2025
But we should not tell him that “God had no moral power to govern him.” We should tell him, that God could not control all his volitions; that he could not govern him as a machine is governed, without destroying his free-agency; but we should still insist that he possessed the most absolute and uncontrollable power to govern him; that God can give him a perfect moral law, and power to obey it, with the most stupendous motives for obedience; and then, if he persist in his disobedience, God can, and will, shut him up in torments forever, that others, seeing the awful consequences of rebellion, may keep their allegiance to him.
It must be admitted, it seems to us, that the advocates of free-agency have too often sanctioned this false conception of liberty, and thereby strengthened the cause of their opponents. Cudworth, Clark, Stuart, Coleridge, and Reid, all speak of this supposed power of the mind over the determinations of the will, as that which constitutes its freedom.
Then if his premises be rational, his deductions legitimate, and his conclusions justly applied, the reader, and possibly the poet himself, may adopt his judgment in the light of judgment and in the independence of free-agency. If he has erred, he presents his errors in a definite place and tangible form, and holds the torch and guides the way to their detection.
I shall answer him, no; that whilst he preserves his reason, there is not even a probability that the desire of proving his free-agency, will become a motive sufficiently powerful, to make him sacrifice his life to the attempt; if, notwithstanding this, to prove he is a free agent, he should actually precipitate himself from the window, it would not be a sufficient warrantry to conclude he acted freely, but rather that it was the violence of his temperament which spurred him on to this folly.
To assert, as these philosophers do, that the power of God cannot act upon the human mind without infringing upon its freedom, betrays, as we venture to affirm, a profound and astonishing ignorance of the whole doctrine of free-agency.
In the adoption of this language, Leibnitz seems to speak with the advocates of free-agency; but does he think with them? The sound is pleasant to the ear; but what sense is it intended to convey to the mind?
We have now seen how some of the early reformers, and some of the great thinkers in after-times, have endeavoured to reconcile the scheme of necessity with the free-agency and accountability of man.
He says, "It would have been better to show articulately that Liberty and Necessity are both incomprehensible, as beyond the limits of legitimate thought; but that though the Free-agency of Man cannot be speculatively proved, so neither can it be speculatively disproved; while we may claim for it as a fact of real actuality, though of inconceivable possibility, the testimony of consciousness, that we are morally free, as we are morally accountable for our actions.
Accordingly, such attempts generally terminate, either in the denial of the free-agency of man, or of the sovereignty of God; and those who have maintained both of these tenets in reality, as well as in name, have usually refused to allow themselves to be troubled by the apparent contradictions in which they are involved.
It is rather singular that the theological defenders of the doctrine of free-agency, which they endeavour to oppose to that of predestination, which according to them is irreconcileable with Christianity, inasmuch as it is a false and dangerous system, should not have been aware that the doctrines of the fall of angels, original sin, the small number of the elect, the system of grace, &c. were most incontestibly supporting, by the most cogent arguments, a true system of fatalism.
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