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Updated: June 28, 2025
The future is nothing; but the past is myself, my own history, the seed of my present thoughts, the mould of my present disposition. It is not in vain that I return to the nothings of my childhood; for every one of them has left some stamp upon me or put some fetter on my boasted free-will. In the past is my present fate; and in the past also is my real life.
The law knows no such thing as repentance; and it is the law, not me nor our worthy friends here, that ye have offended. In short, Mr Hickery, the matter is such that, in one word, either you and Mr Plan must quit your seats at this table of your own free-will, or I must quit mine, and mine I will not give up without letting the public know the shame on your part that has compelled me."
She watched the people going to the Notary's office with their tributes and free-will offerings, and they seemed like people in a play these days she lived no life which was theirs. It was a dream, unimportant and temporary. She was feeling what was behind all life, and permanent. It could not last, but there it was; and she could not return to the transitory till this cloud of fate was lifted.
Has man a free will? does his choice of action and thought come from a power within himself? Is there a uniting will, operating in our actions, a something of an integral indivisible kind, which is non-material yet which controls matter? Taking the free-will idea at its face value leads us nowhere in our study of character.
The element of free-will, cunning, spontaneity, individuality so omnipresent, so essential, yet so unreasonable, and so inconsistent with the other element not less omnipresent and not less essential, I mean necessity, luck, fate this element of free-will, which comes from the unseen kingdom within which the writs of our thoughts run not, must be carried down to the most tenuous atoms whose action is supposed most purely chemical and mechanical; it can never be held as absolutely eliminated, for if it be so held, there is no getting it back again, and that it exists, even in the lowest forms of life, cannot be disputed.
Mala fama. Maleficium, publice commissum. Apparitio daemonis in monte. Whereupon the most honourable central court cited about 20 auctores, whereof, howbeit, we remember but little. When Dom. Consul had read out this to my child, he once more lift up his voice and admonished her with many words to confess of her own free-will, for that the truth must now come to light.
The coming of the Jesuits, too, emphasised the appeal: here were two men, as the world itself confessed, of exceptional ability for Campion had been a famous Oxford orator, and Persons a Fellow of Balliol choosing, under a free-will obedience, first a life of exile, and then one of daily peril and apprehension, the very thought of which burdened the imagination with horror; hunted like vermin, sleeping and faring hard, their very names detested by the majority of their countrymen, with the shadow of the gallows moving with them, and the reek of the hangman's cauldron continually in their nostrils and for what?
And those who resented the delay on the part of the Council in sending back the Priest Captain's envoy with a sharp denial, presently went on from hot words to violent deeds; being directly led from mutinous talk to mutinous action by the knowledge that the Council had so far accepted the offered terms as to send Fray Antonio to the great city to be slain for not one among them could be led for a moment to believe, so impossible from their stand-point did such an act appear, that the monk truly had gone thither of his own free-will.
She ought not to find in this compulsory submission any excuse for yielding to a lover, because some time after her marriage she has discovered in her own heart a traitor whose sophisms seduce her by asking twenty times an hour, "Wherefore, since she has been given against her will to a man whom she does not love, should she not give herself, of her own free-will, to a man whom she does love."
But suppose that the design of God involved the perfecting of men as the CHILDREN OF GOD 'I said ye are gods, that he would have them partakers of his own blessedness in kind be as himself; suppose his grand idea could not be contented with creatures perfect ONLY by his gift, so far as that should reach, and having no willing causal share in the perfection, that is, partaking not at all of God's individuality and free-will and choice of good; then suppose that suffering were the only way through which the individual could be set, in separate and self-individuality, so far apart from God, that it might WILL, and so become a partaker of his singleness and freedom; and suppose that this suffering must be and had been initiated by God's taking his share, and that the infinitely greater share; suppose next, that God saw the germ of a pure affection, say in your friend and his wife, but saw also that it was a germ so imperfect and weak that it could not encounter the coming frosts and winds of the world without loss and decay, while, if they were parted now for a few years, it would grow and strengthen and expand, to the certainty of an infinitely higher and deeper and keener love through the endless ages to follow so that by suffering should come, in place of contented decline, abortion, and death, a troubled birth of joyous result in health and immortality; suppose all this, and what then?"
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