HARMONY OF DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM 37 1 



nature is a fountain out-measuring every possible 

 actuality, that therefore we might have done differ- 

 ently, and that consequently we have contracted 

 guilt — guilt, not simply before some external tri- 

 bunal, be it even God's, but guilt before the more 

 inexorable bar of our own soul. 



Assuredly, then, we may dismiss the charge that 

 the free system is a polytheism. Not a single mem- 

 ber of it except God is identical with God, either 

 in existence or in character. All but God provide 

 in their own being the liability to sin, and when 

 once, owing to their sins already, they present in 

 their natural circumstances a character sufficiently 

 defective, then the natural law of cause and effect 

 operates, and they are certain then to sin yet more ; 

 though not even this certainty in the connexion of 

 their evil experiences is predestined upon them by 

 any "decree" of God, or by any other efficient act 

 of God, for God has no efficient relation to their 

 being, nor they to his. The certainty issues from 

 their own freedom, which is responsible not only 

 for the causal connexion between their antecedent 

 and consequent states, but directly for the existence 

 of the antecedent. It is therefore a certainty for 

 which neither God nor any vague " nature of things " 

 is responsible at all. The presence of it in their 

 life, and still more the presence of the liability from 



