32 



emotion, choice ; and you cannot theorise away this positive factor into a 

 mere mystical zero, any more than you can get rid of the great primal I AM 

 by refusing to think of Him as knowable. 



It is by means of volitions that a man is most directly conscious of his 

 own personality. He knows that he can resist certain impulses and inclina- 

 tions ; that he can refuse to do what he is commanded to do by others, or 

 tempted to do by some motive to which his Eeason or Judgment does not 

 assent. Conscious of this freedom (for freedom it is, however it may be 

 ultimately limited by Law or moulded by a higher Will), man feels himself 

 to be a responsible agent. Without ii, he would not be man. 



The philosopher, metaphysical or ethical, must, if he honestly take into 

 account all phenomena, treat the existence of free will in man as a funda- 

 mental truth. The theologian has another question to deal with (though it 

 is very much bound up with the broader philosophical one) when he in- 

 quires into the amount of moral strength, or extent of moral helplessness, 

 found in the human will, after it has been once perverted by disobedience 

 to Divine Law. 



The metaphysical postulate is, that Man's Will is free : the ethical axiom 

 is, that Man is responsible for what he does ; the teaching of the Christian 

 religion is, that Man's Will, perverted and enfeebled for good by sin, is 

 by God's grace restored to the highest condition of freedom, where the 

 Divine Will and the Human Will concur, and in the service of God man 

 finds his perfect freedom. 



FURTHER REPLY BY THE AUTHOR. 



I have now read with extreme care, many times over, the remarks made 

 by the various speakers, and the notes since appended by Lord O'Neill and 

 Canon Saumarez Smith. The whole forms, I think, an instructive com- 

 mentary on the unity in variety which marks those who think alike on the 

 deepest and most formative conceptions. There is one spirit dwelling in all, 

 the differences are only superficial, the unity is deep and structural. 

 Necessarily from eleven minds united we get a larger, and more complete 

 view of the full-orbed truth than can be obtained by any one mind. As the 

 chairman and several of the speakers agree that the Freedom of the Will is 

 the one point wherein the upholders of Revelation and the Moral Law clash 

 most distinctly, and in irreconcileable antagonism, with the advocates of 

 Determinism and Automatism, I trust that the importance of the subject 

 will justify me if I attempt to reduce to a consistent logical unity what has 

 been contributed by all who have taken part in the discussion. Truth is 

 one, it is the intellectual expression of the one God ; all his servants have 

 broken glimpses of the full-orbed idea ; what one lacks another supplies. 

 Let us then try to blend all into one clear and luminous image. We all are 



