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Updated: June 25, 2025
They have a feeling as if there were at bottom a stronger tie between the volitions and their causes; as if, when they asserted that the will is governed by the balance of motives, they meant something more cogent than if they had only said, that whoever knew the motives, and our habitual susceptibilities to them, could predict how we should will to act.
And unless some distinction be made between the real agency of God and our own volitions, which distinction true Quakerism suggests, we shall be liable to be tossed to and fro by every wind that blows, and to become the creatures of a superstition, that may lead us into great public evils, while it may be injurious to our health and intellect, and to the happiness and utility of our lives.
If we should tell such a man, that God possesses the absolute power to control his volitions, and that nothing ever happens on earth but in perfect accordance with his good will and pleasure, might we not expect him to conclude, that he would then leave the matter with God, and give himself no trouble about it?
All these catenations of animal motions, are liable to proceed some time after they are excited, unless they are disturbed or impeded by other irritations, sensations, or volitions; and in many instances in spite of our endeavours to stop them; and this property of animal motions is probably the cause of their catenation.
The fact, then, that human conduct is subject to causation, and may by adequate intelligence be predicted in its minutest details until the end of time, no more proves that it is governed by invariable laws, which act irrespectively of human volitions, than the corresponding fact with reference to Divine conduct impairs the freedom of the Divine Will.
Now it is a people alive with ideas and volitions; the young generation dreams noble dreams, and, what is stranger, dies to execute them. Our Bund is the soul of the Russian revolution; our self-defence bands are bringing back the days of Judas Maccabæus. In the olden times of massacre our people fled to the synagogues to pray; now they march to the fight like men.
What is one to conclude from that, save that the soul cannot be the efficient cause of its volitions, any more than of its ideas, and of the motion of the spirits which cause our arms to move? That is indeed a strange way of reasoning! What necessity is there for one always to be aware how that which is done is done?
Fourteen doctrinal articles were prepared by H. L. Baugher, B. Kurtz, and S. W. Harkey, containing, among other statements, also the following: "We believe that the Scriptures teach that God has given to man, as a natural gift, the power of choice, and that, whilst he is influenced in his volitions by motives, he always possesses the ability to choose the opposite of that which was the object of his choice.
A free moral agent, all whose volitions and actions, are fixed by an immutable decree! We are ignorant how God knows, or how he foreknows. Perhaps past and future relate only to creatures, Every thing may be present to the divine mind with God there may be an eternal Now.
A spirit capable of looking us through and through would be able to calculate all our volitions and actions beforehand. In spite of this admitted inevitableness of our resolutions and actions, the predicate of freedom really belongs to them, and this on two grounds.
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