the belief — justified, as we contend, by particular declarations of Scripture, and still more l>y a com- ]ireliensive view of the Divine training of man, which finds its clearest interpretation in the Bible — tliat no human spirit is left destitute of the life- giving visitations of the Divine Spirit, and that, rudimentary as that moral and spiritual life may be which at first He has sought or seeks to create and to foster, e.ff. in the savage or in many e\en of those who live in Christian lands, no uou.hIs can be set to the growth which may, and which \la intends should, result in this world or anothv', wherever the human will is consentient. This, is consistent with our ideas of justice, while at Che same time it reco"nizes man's absolute dependence always upon God's grace, and can atroril man no ground for claiming merit in the sight of God ; for there can be no merit in his allowing himself to be saved, though he maj' justly expose himself to blame and loss if he frustrates God's merciful design. Further, it does not lower the super- natural to the level of the natural, thovigh it treats that which is often called mere natural goodness as itself the outflow of a supernatural life, and as one of the lower stages, it may be, in an ascent to the highest saintliness.
3. To the extent, then, at least of giving or withholding that resjionse to the leading of the Divine Spirit of which we have spoken, man is, according to the teaching of Scripture, free. It will, however, be said on behalf of Necessitarian- ism by adherents of the so-called Experience Philosophy, or Naturalism, that this response itself, and with it every feeling, thought, j)urpose, so far as they are not determined by causes now external to the individual, are the result of char- acter, which has been itself completely determined and could be fully accounted for, and its products also predicted, if we knew fully the human beings parentage and life-history, as well as his present circumstances, and if the whole combination were not too complex for us to deal with by the aid of any science which we possess or are likely to pos- sess. The force of this reasoning — and it cannot be denied that it has force — lies in the fact that to a very large extent mental phenomena are, or may with a high degree of probability be held to he, subject to Natural Law, and that the ra|)id and vast extension in our conception of its domain which has in recent times taken place, predis- poses us to believe that all our experience may in reality come under it. On the other side, however, it may be urged that the consciousness in man of a power of choice, of a sense of responsibility fur his conduct, his conviction often that he might have done better or acted in some way otherwise than he has, and the remorse whicli he feels, in spite of his readiness to complain of the action of an adverse fate, the bl.ame which he imimtes to him- self or to others for any lack of loyalty to truth and right, of firmness and of courage, are facts which cannot be satisfactorily explained on the principles of Naturalism. We seem here to be brought f.ace to face with an element in the sources of human character and action which, whatever its laws may be, is not subject merely to laws analogous to those which we can trace in the physical order, — a power of self-determination, a force which within a limited — in each individual a very limited — range is truly creative, a causation which is not merely phenomenal but real. As believers in the biblical revelation, we can suppose only that the all-wi-se and loving Creator, without diminishing aught from the fiilness of His own power, has yet, in making man a spiritual being, imparted to him a certain— by comparison infini- tesimal— amount of power like His own, and lefl him to make an independent use of it with a
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view to the discipline and training which he would thus receive, and also to the response which the creature ini^^ht then render to the Creator, and which would be otherwise impossible (of. R. Browning, Christirias Eve and Easter Day, § 5). On the pliilosophical side we derive support for this view from many of the ablest thinkers of the past 150 years, from Kant and Hegel onwards, tliough it is necessary that we should emphasize the separation between the liunian and the Divine will more decidedly than some of the transcen- dental school do, in order to guard against Pan- theism and against falling again virtually into Necessitarianism, though one of a ditl'erent kind from that before spoken of.
Before passing on, it may be well to point out to what a small extent there can be any alliance between those theologians who hold that man altogether lost freedom of the will by the Fall, and philosophical Necessitarians of any school. The tatter build upon their conception of what has ever been the constitution of num, of nature, and of the universe ; whereas the theologians to whom we have referred regard, and must regard, man as, according to his original and true constitution, free. It is only in attempts to prove that man's belief in his own freedom is wholly illusory that they can make common ground ; but this is the weakest part of the philosophers' case.