infallibly determined by their character to holiness, yet fallen men and saints are admitted to be free. Ability may be lost, yet lib- erty remain. The former is lost since the fall. Restored b}^ grace, as they say, it is to be again lost in that liberty to good which is identical with necessity. If liberty and ability are thus distinct, why should they be confounded ? We are conscious of liberty. We know ourselves to be free in all our volitions. They reveal themselves to our inmost consciousness as acts of self-determina- tion. We cannot disown them, or escape responsibility on account of them, even if we try ; and yet no man is conscious of ability to change his own heart. Free agency belongs to God, to angels, to saints in glory, to fallen men, and to Satan ; and it is the same in all. Yet in the strictest sense of the words, God cannot do evil ; neither can Satan recover, by a volition, his lost inheritance of holiness. It is a great evil thus to confound things essentially distinct. It produces endless confusion. Augustine says, man is not free since the fall, because he cannot but sin ; saints are free because they cannot sin. Inability in the one case destroys free- dom ; inability in the other is the perfection of freedom! Necessity is the very opposite of liberty, and yet they are said to be identical. One man in asserting the freedom of the will, means to assert free agency, while he denies ability ; another means by it full ability. It is certainly important that the same words should not be used to express antagonistic ideas.
Confusion of thought and language, however, is not the principal evil which arises from making liberty and ability identical. It necessarily brings us into conflict with the truth, and with the moral judgments of men. There are three truths of which every man is convinced from the very constitution of his nature. (1.) That he is a free agent. (2.) That none but free agents can be accountable for their character or conduct. (3.) Tliat he does not possess ability to change his moral state by an act of the will. Now, if in order to express the fact of his inability, we say, that he is not a free agent, we contradict his consciousness ; or, if he believe what we say, we destroy his sense of responsibility. Or if we tell him that because he is a free agent, he has power to change his heart at will, we ao;ain brinor ourselves into conflict with his convictions. He knows he is a free agent, and yet he knows that he has not the power to make himself holy. Free agency is the power to decide according to our character; ability is the power to change our character by a volition. The former, the Bible and con- sciousness affirm belongs to raan in every condition of his being;
294 PART n. ch. IX. — free agency.
the latter, the Bible and consciousness teach with equal explicitness does not belong to fallen man. The two things, therefore, ought not to be confounded.
Self-determination and Self-determination of the Will.
Sixthly, Another source of confusion is not discriminating be- tween self-determination and self-determination of the will. Those who use the latter expression, say they intend to deny that the will is determined by the antecedent state of the mind, and to affirm that it has a self-determining power, independent of any- thing preexisting or coexisting. They say that those who teach that when the state of the mind is the same, the volition will inevitably be the same, teach necessity and fatalism, and reduce the will to a machine. " I know," says Reid, " nothing more that can be desii'ed to establish fatalism throughout the universe. When it is proved that, through all nature, the same consequences invariably result from the same circumstances, the doctrine of lib- erty must be given up."^ The opposite doctrine is, that the will is "self-moved ; it makes its nisus of itself, and of itself it forbears to make it, and within the sphere of its activity, and in relation to its objects, it has the power of selecting, by a mere arbitrary act, an)' particular object. It is a cause all whose acts, as well as any particular act, considered as phenomena demanding a cause, are accounted for in itself alone. "^ Thus, if it be asked why the will decides one way rather than another, the reason is to be sought in its self-determining power. It can by an arbitrary act, choose or not choose, choose one way or another, without a motive or with a motive, for or against any or all influences brought to bear upon it. But when these writers come to prove their case, it turns out that this is not at all what they mean. It is not the self-determining power of the will, but the self-determining power of the agent that they are contending for. Reid says that all that is involved in free agency is that man is an agent, the author of his own acts, or that we are " efficient causes in our deliberate and voluntary actions."^ " To say that man is a free agent, is no more than to say that, in some instances, he is truly an agent and a cause, and
1 It may be well to remark, in passing, how uniformly writers of the school to which Reid belongs, identify certainty and necessity, so long as they argue against an opponent. In the passage above quoted, it is not that the will is determined by necessity, or by a cause out of the mind, l)ut simply that the same decisions '' invariably " occur in the sani* circumstances, that is declared to be fatalism.
2 Tappan's Rtview of Edwards, edit. New York, 1839, p. 223.
« Active Powers, Essay iv. ch. 2; Works, Edinburgh, 1849, p. 603.
§3.] CERTAINTY CONSISTENT WITH LIBERTY. 29o
is not merely acted upon as a passive instrument."^ Dr. Samuel Clarke, in his controversy with Leibnitz, says, " the power of self- motion or action, which, in all animate agents, is s[)ontaneity, is, in moral or rational agents, what we properly call liberty." Again, he says, "the true definition of liberty is the power to act." Now, as all the advocates of the doctrine of moral certainty admit self- determination of the agent, and deny the self-determining power of the will, the greatest confusion must follow from confounding these two things ; and, besides this, undue advantage is thereby secured for the doctrine of the self-determining power of the will, by arguments which prove only self-determination, which every man admits. On the other hand unfair prejudice is created against the truth by representing it as denying the power of self-determi- nation, when it only denies the self-determining power of the will. Thus President Edwards is constantly represented as denying that volitions are self-determinations, or that the mind is the efficient cause of its own acts, or that man is an agent, because he wrote against the self-determining power of the will as taught by Clarke and Whitby. These two things ought not to be confounded, be- cause they are really distinct. When we say that an agent is self- determined, we say two tilings. (1.) That he is the author or efficient cause of his own act. (2.) That the grounds or reasons of his determination are within himself. He is determined by what constitutes him at the moment a particular individual, his feelings, principles, character, dispositions ; and not by any ah extra or coercive influence. But when we say that the will is self-<leter- mined, we separate it from the other constituents of the man, as an independent power, and on the one hand, deny that it is determined by anything in the man ; and on the other, affirm that it deter- mines itself by an inherent self-moving, arbitrary power. In this case the volition ceases to be a decision of the agent, for it may be contrary to that agent's whole character, principles, inclinations, feelings, convictions, or whatever else makes him what he is.
§ 3. Certainty Consistent with Liberty.
Although the doctrine of necessity subverts the foundation of all morality and religion, our present concern is with the doctrine of contingency. We wish simply to state the case as between cer- tainty and uncertainty. The doctrine of necessity, in the proper sense of the woi'd, is antichristian ; but the Christian world is, and ever has been divided between the advocates and opponents of tlie
i Active Powers, Essay iv. ch. 3 ; Ww ks, p. 607.
296 PART n. Ch. IX.— free AGENCY.