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some of the principles which I had the honour to lay before the Institute 
in a paper earlier in the year ; and as it states my own view, I will 
not take up your time at any length upon the question as to whether 
man does actually possess a free will. In my own paper I used the term 
“ rational will,” and I was not wholly understood ; but when I unfold my 
theory of the moral nature of man it will be seen what I did mean. There 
are those who deny the freedom of the will, and among them are the Posi- 
tivist philosophers ; but it does appear to me most wonderful that they 
should hold to that view in the lace of the examples that can be brought 
against them, and especially in the face of one or two examples from ancient 
history. What could be more grand and more noble than the sacrifice of 
the four hundred Spartans at Thermopylae : the inscription “ Go, stranger, 
and tell the Lacedemonians that we lie here obeying their laws,” records 
the pure idea of voluntary self-sacrifice. So, again, take the Christian 
martyr. I want to know whether his sacrifice — that rational sacrifice 
in which all his rational powers concurred — was not the exercise of free- 
will. It is by means of the concurrence of our rational powers in the 
act that self-sacrifice takes place. The Duke of Argyll has fallen into 
the same error. Although I have the greatest respect for his Grace, 
still, when he takes up the subject of freedom, he takes the lowest 
forms of human or even of animal action to reason from, and that is out 
of place. Why should they not take the higher acts of the human under- 
standing or intellect to illustrate their theory ? To sink down to some poor 
miserable wretched cat, (though I do not mean to deny that a cat has freedom 
of will to a certain extent,) appears to me to be going uncommonly wide of the 
mark. Mr. English states : — “ Mr. John Stuart Mill has said it has never 
been possible to extract a body of ethical docrine from the New Testament.” 
I agree with the author in joining issue upon that assertion. It is utterly 
absurd, and it is plain that Mr. Mill can have given no sustained thought 
to it. I admit that the four Gospels contain no perfect rules of ethics, and 
blessed be Heaven that they do not ; but I hold that they contain all the 
great principles which are the foundation of ethics — that they do bear out 
the principles of moral philosophy, and that the principles of moral philo- 
sophy do bear out the Gospels. Mr. English says further on : — “ The Founder 
of Christianity sought to stir up morality by an appeal to the springs of 
moral action, love for mankind ( ayd7CT) — <pi\av0po)7rla = humanitas ) 
being the foundation of virtue which He laid down.” But I go further and 
say that the basis of moral action is faith. In the character of God, and 
in the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, there is laid the basis of moral action. 
What in fact produces the feeling of benevolence in my mind ? Some thought 
suitable to awaken that feeling. Mr. English further says : — “ The powers 
of reason are treated by the Founder of Christianity as regulative merely, 
and the mere intellectualist, such as Mr. Mill, misses the root of the matter 
when he seeks to build up an ethical system upon merely rationalistic 
grounds.’” But I do not think that the Founder of Christianity has treated 
the principles of the intellect as merely regulative. I am satisfied that our 
