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On questions of inspiration, and the deeper problems of human life, he is less distinct, being naturally inclined to a speculative necessitarianism, and disposed to admit original depravity; but he did not see his way out of the maze through the Atonement, and held that prayer had only significance as a devotional affection of the heart.
Augustine, Calvin, and Mahomet, believe in predestination, yet an Augustinian is something utterly different from a Scotch Cameronian or a Mahometan.... The idea which runs through the whole of Mother Juliana is the very contradictory of Wycliffe's Pantheistic Necessitarianism."
W. Cattle, for instance, in his Papist-baiting, and Mr. Bradlaugh in his Hyde Park anarchy- mongering, have their fling. But then the Daily News suddenly lights up the gloom of necessitarianism with bright beams of hope. "No doubt," it says, "the common reason of society ought to check the aberrations of individual eccentricity."
The better we know, the better we act; and the fallacy of all common arguments against necessitarianism lies in the assumption that it leaves no room for self-direction: it merely insists, in exact conformity with experience, on the conditions under which self-determination is possible. Conduct, according to the necessitarian, depends on knowledge.
Robert Buchanan may say to persuade us. Hebraism builds churches, indeed, for these masses, and sends missionaries among them; above all, it sets itself against the social necessitarianism of The Times, and refuses to accept their degradation as inevitable; but with regard to their ever-increasing accumulation, it seems to be led to the very same conclusions, though from a point of view of its own, as our free-trading Liberal friends.
In proportion as we look at history thus; searching for effective, rather than final causes, and content to see God working everywhere, without impertinently demanding of Him a reason for His deeds, we shall study in a frame of mind equally removed from superstition on the one hand, and necessitarianism on the other.
But if there be such a point at all, it is fatal to necessitarianism, and man is what he has been hitherto supposed to be an exception in the order of nature, with a power not differing in degree but differing in kind from those of other creatures. Moral life, like all life, is a mystery; and as to anatomise the body will not reveal the secret of animation, so with the actions of the moral man.
He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets.
Conscience and the moral progress of the race these are his points of departure. Faith in the reality of the moral law is what he clings to when his inherited creed has yielded to the pressure of the intellect, and after all the storms of pessimism and necessitarianism have passed over him.
And this necessitarianism, taking for granted that an increase in trade and population is a good in itself, one of the chiefest of goods, tells us that disturbances of human happiness caused by ebbs and flows in the tide of trade and business, which, on the whole, steadily mounts, are inevitable and not to be quarrelled with.
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