The premises are unquestionable, but the conclusion is a non-seqiiitur. A future event may be certain, may be known as certain, and its opposite be possible notwith- standing; will be is not the same as must be. The argu- ment would be equally forcible if the foreknowledge of God were eliminated. Knowledge is not causative; the knowledge of an event has nothing to do with its produc- tion. All that the divine prescience of future events does in this argument is to prove their certainty. But this must be admitted without such proof: all things will be as they will be, whether God knows them or not. The history of the universe will be in one way, and not two; objective certainty is self-evident. But certainty is not necessity; it does not exclude the possibility of an oppo- site. Prescience neither helps nor hurts this case at all. If a man can see no difference between certainty and necessity, he cannot admit contingency ; he is logically shut up to invincible fate. If one does apprehend a clear difference between will be and must be, he may affirm both prescience and contingency. Between these two parties thus cognizing these ultimate ideas there must be a perpetual difference of opinion on the question un- der discussion. Further controversy is useless; they have reached the ultimate of the question; they must stand face to face, one affirming contingency, and the other necessity, without the possibility of an argument from either that will be of any service to the other.
(0.) Divine Sovereignty. — God governs the worlil in accordance with a plan. No existence or event can be permitted to contravene his plan; all existences and
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events must be inclurled in the plan, and each must form a constituent part thereof. To suppose anytlilng coiitinnont upon tlic human will is to take that thing from the purview of the divine sovereignty, subject it to human caprice, to uncertainty, to chance. 'I'lierefore nothing can be possible which is different from what is.
All tlie strength of this argument lies in one or the other, or both, of two conceptions. One of these con- cejjtions is that a perfect government implies an abso- lute control, a determining efficiency; the other is that contingency is the equivalent of uncertainty, no cause, chance. The one conception is that the divine sover- eignty cannot be complete and perfect unless all that is not (jod be reduced to the condition of machinery. The antagonist of this idea is the conception of a govern- ment of beings endowed with alternative powers. The idea that a contingency is an uncertainty is antagonized by the conception that contingency and certainty may both be predicated of the same event ; it may be cer- tain that a thing will be, and yet, at the same time, be possible that it may not be. These antagonizing con- ceptions are ultimate; and two parties, the one enter- taining one and the other the other, must forever be at variance. Controversy closes, the one party affirming and the other denying. If God cannot know how his creatures will conduct themselves when endowed with alternative power, when left to determine their conduct by their own free will; if he cannot govern the world when much of its history is within the power of his creatures, when much that is, is determined and enacted by the free volitions of men, then freedomism must quit the field, and, as we see it, fatalism is triumphant. There are innumerable possibilities which never become actu- al ; if the actual be the measure of the possible, then fate governs all things.
III. Literature. — Arminius, Works (Auburn, N. Y. 1853,3 vols.Svo), i, 252; ii,472; Wesley, Works (N. Y. ed.'), ii, 69, 404, 4G0; v, 39: vi, 41, 49, 127, 584; vii, 97; Fletcher, Works (ibid.), i, 90 sq., 322, 502; ii, 227, etc.; Watson, Theological Institutes (ibid.), ii, 435 sq. ; Fisk, Cah'inistic Controversy (ibid. 1835), p. 129 sq. ; Bledsoe, Examination of Edwards (Phila. 1845) ; Whedon, Free- dom of the Will (N. Y. 18G4) ; liaymond. Systematic The- ology (Cincinnati, 1877), ii, 140 sq. ; Pope, Christian The- ology (Lond. and N. Y. 1879 sq.), ii, 3G3 sq. A very mod- erately Calvinistic, but not strictly Arminian, view of the will may be found in the Baptist Review, 1880, p. 527 stp See Ar.minianism; Theology (New England) ; Wesleyanism. (M. K.)
WILL, Calvinistic Doctrine of the. It is obvi- ous that consistent Calvinists and Pelagians cannot hold the same theorj' as to the nature, conditions, and ex- tent of the freedom of man in willing. It is no less certain that Evangelical Calvinists can, in perfect logi- cal consistency with their system of faith, hold any the- ory of human freedom which is open to evangelical Ar- minians in consistency with the logic of their system.
I. Freedom of the Will. — It has always been part of the religious faith of Calvinists that man is a free re- sponsible agent. The various methods of philosophi- cally accounting for the fact of freedom, and the relation of tiie will to tlie other faculties of the soul, and of its freedom to the revealed doctrines of sin and grace, are elements of philosophy and not of theology. The West- minster Confession of Faith represents all other Calvinis- tic standards in asserting as follows :