THE ORIGIN, NATURE, AND PURPOSE OF HUMAN

THE

FRAILTY.

HE advocates of "free will" appeal to every man's consciousness. Homo sum; ergo dicam.

I am not conscious of having ever performed any act of volition that was not fully determined by my previous character and the circumstances in which I was placed. I am utterly unable to conceive of any freedom of will, or understand what it can be, that sets aside in any degree the laws of cause and effect. No freedom that I know anything about consists in being free from one's own character; but always in being comparatively free from other forces: and my character seems to be the determinate result of my previous history.

I may be asked whether my consciousness of a faculty and tendency enabling and impelling me to praise and blame does not testify to the existence of a freedom of will without which praise and blame would be absurd. Before we undertake to explain a fact, let us know accurately what it is. It is precisely when a man is governed by moral or immoral influences that I praise or blame him. It is precisely when his will is "free" from their operation-precisely when neither fear of punishment, hope of reward, sense of duty, nor love of right has any power to regulate his life, that I call him insane, and withhold from him both praise and blame. If it be reasonable to praise or blame a man when his conduct is so governed, my conscience acts reasonably: if it be absurd, my conscience acts absurdly.

Before I praise or blame, I require that the character or disposition shall have an opportunity to exert an influence upon the conduct. This is all the freedom that I regard as requisite. It is not necessary that such influence shall be exerted otherwise than in accordance with laws of cause and effect as definite in their operation as any of the laws of nature.

I do not say that I make no allowances for disadvantages of birth or education. I do sometimes make such allowances; perhaps not as often as I ought. It is probable that there is much inconsistency in my various judgments, and that I sometimes refuse or neglect to make allowances that I make in other cases with less reason. I have been endeavoring simply to state facts; not to justify myself: to speak as a witness; not as an advocate or judge.

Now permit me to retire from the witness-stand, that I may be at liberty to mingle speculation with observation and experience.

The motion of the locomotive and the train behind it seems to me a proper type of all action. All things move as they are moved, either by internal or external forces, or both. Capacity for action is always capability of being set in action. My will is simply my mind's moveableness.

It may be urged, as a reductio ad absurdum that, if I am correct, the Deity himself acts only as he is set in action. The logic is good; but the conclusion is not absurd. Why then call him the First Cause? I answer that the appellation may be inappropriate. I conceive of God as an Eternal Conscious Activity, never without a universe acting upon him, he reacting upon it: so that he might as well be called First Effect as First Cause; but better neither; as in the infinite chain of causes and effects reaching back into the beginningless past, there is absolutely no First Link.

Here some of the advocates of free will may think that they discern a fatal fallacy, consisting in what seems to them an unwarrantable application of the laws of matter to mental action. I reply that, so far as I can judge, any law universal in either of the domains of matter or of mind, if applicable at all in the other, is also universal there. Two simple ideas and three simple ideas make by addition five simple ideas and neither more nor less, as inevitably as two beans and three beans make five beans, without defect or excess. The axioms, "The whole is equal to the sum of all its parts" and "Ex nihilo nihil fit" are universal in both domains. Indeed, it is in regard to my own volitions that I can most clearly discern the operation of causes; and I insist that I can therein perceive the inflexibility of law as easily as anywhere, and have no need to borrow it from physical science.

Is the mind a mere machine? If everything whose action is fully governed and determined by forces is therefore a machine, I know of nothing in the universe that is not a machine. I have better employment than to contend against that word. When machines possess intelligence and are acted upon by moral as well as physical forces, I make them objects of praise and blame.

An old colored woman in my neighborhood, having been a slave from her birth to old age, has succeeded, by great perseverance and economy, during her few years of freedom, in accumulating a little property; and a few months ago she bid off a building-lot at auction. To draw up the necessary legal documents, she employed, by the auctioneer's advice, a lawyer who has taken advantage of the opportunity to extort the utmost possible farthing. Undertaking to intercede for her, I have received only insult. I feel very indignant. The supposition that his conduct has proceeded from an avaricious disposition,

and was as certain, whenever such an opportunity should occur, to follow from that cause, as death is to follow decapitation, would not diminish my indignation. Nor is my indignation justified by any theory as to the manner in which that avaricious disposition was acquired. If he is viewed as a machine, it would please me to have that machine shut up in jail a few months.

It does indeed seem difficult-perhaps I should rather say impossible to explain how any eternal principle of justice can demand vengeance for sins foreordained before the sinner's birth, whether by an arbitrary decree or by a law implanted in his nature. I question whether any such demand comes from eternal justice. It may be that it comes only from a universal animal instinct which we share in common with the brutes, and which is suited to our semi-brute condition.

When I was a babe, I fretted and annoyed my mother. When I was a boy, I told a few falsehoods. I see no reason now to grieve over the one more than over the other. It is sufficient, if having become a man, I have put away childish things, and ceased both to squall and lie. It is as reasonable to insist that the physically perfect man must never have had the measles, as that the morally perfect man must never have been a sinner.

If I were a savage, skinning alive some victim because his grandfather had injured mine, and should learn that my own ancestor had, in like manner, injured some other man, I should probably feel guilty of my ancestor's offence, and appear to myself a proper subject for vengeance at the hands of the injured man's descendants. That my readers do not blame themselves for their father's sins, is an evidence of the influence of education upon the conscience. Why should I blame myself for the sin of my boyhood, and not for the sin of my father? It may be a wise dispensation of Providence or beneficent law of Nature that requires me to suffer for either or both; as indeed the subject may suffer for the crime of his king, and any man may suffer from unavoidable accident. It may be well to endure the suffering with patience, however occasioned; but it is unnecessary to regard it as inflicted by eternal justice.

If I make a mistake resulting in great injury to some other person, I experience a feeling of shame scarcely distinguishable from guilt. This feeling of shame may be mitigated, but not removed, by a consciousness of entire rectitude of intention, and the knowledge that the best man on earth was liable to make the same mistake. A hypothetical example may make this more evident. Suppose, then, that I circulate a totally false report to some one's great and irreparable

injury, fully believing it to be true, and its circulation to be necessary for the protection of society. The reader can imagine the inevitable consequence on my feelings when I learn the truth. My conscience does not seem to be entirely fashioned by education or controlled by reason. It may sometimes obey natural instincts that overpower all opposition.

A little boy, playing rudely by his mother's side, after she had chided him several times for his boisterousness, looked up thoughtfully, and said, "Mother, I don't see how it is that you don't want a noise. I like a noise." While we like vengeance, it is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how any being can be so constituted as not to like it, or how it can be possible that God does not demand it. The fatal error in Calvin's theory consisted in simply forgetting that the equation must be freed from the anthropocentric parallax.

The Calvinistic doctrine in full, representing God as having solely for his own glory doomed to everlasting agony millions of human beings for sins that he had foreordained, would indeed establish an eternal distinction between right and wrong. The eternal wrong would consist in meanly praising the Almighty Despot; the eternal right, in bravely cursing him.

Arminianism, with the same view of human destiny, is no better. If the foundation of human character is not innate, it is certainly laid in early childhood. No man can remember the time when he had the opportunity to decide whether he should be sinless or sinful. Are we to believe that sinlessness is so infinitely precious, and the consequences of its loss so inconceivably dreadful, and yet that God has deliberately made it a children's toy, to be played with and destroyed? The Calvinist's braggart, boldly avowing the horrid deed as having been committed by himself for his own eternal glory, is a more respectable Deity than the Arminian's coward, skulking behind little children, and shrieking that they did it, and not he.

There is no escape from the truth that God is responsible for the condition of the world as it exists to-day. Can we conceive of no better motive leading him to fill this planet with sin and its consequences, than a desire to promote his own selfish glory in the exhibition of despotic power?

I believe we are indebted to Jesus for the first intimation of the great truth, which none before him knew, and scarcely any one knows now, that it is a positive advantage to have sinned. While at dinner with a Pharisee, he received some attentions from a woman who was known as a sinner. The Pharisee wondered that Jesus should consent to receive attentions from such a source; whereupon Jesus turned

to him, and proved by good sound argument that if the woman had sinned and he had not, she had the advantage over him in that respect. The reader will find the account in the seventh chapter of Luke. The parable of the lost sheep also makes a comparison between penitence and sinlessness, well worthy of careful thought, but which the professed followers of Jesus have never incorporated into their creeds. It is very remarkable that Jesus, fettered as he was by the superstitions of his time and nation, many of which he evidently shared, should yet have been able to take so god-like a view of human frailty. It was more to his glory than to have wrought all the miracles.

man.

A man with no past experience of sin, if such a being were possible, would be an imperfect man. This is a fatal defect in the ideal Jesus of the Church. I deny that the true Jesus was an infallible pope in order that I may assert that he was what is better—a fallible Having been tempted in all points as we are, and not without sin, the perfect man should be able not only to succor those who are tempted, but also to sympathize with, and reclaim those who have yielded to temptation. He should be qualified for his work by personal experience, and not by a mere intellectual conception of what he has never felt.

The German writer Lessing says, in substance, "If God were to offer me in one hand Truth, and in the other Search after Truth, and bid me choose between them, I would reverently choose Search after Truth." It was in wisdom and goodness that God made us ignorant and sinful, withholding from us as native gifts Perfect Truth and Ferfect Virtue, that he might bestow upon us the better gifts, Search after Truth and Search after Virtue.

the germ of a better nature,

The primitive man is selfish and revengeful. As long as he is primitive man, he ought to be selfish and revengeful. God made no mistake in making him so. Implanted in his original constitution is destined to become blossom and fruit in his descendants if not in himself. It is merely a germ: it ought to be merely a germ. God is not angry that it is merely a germ: he knows his own workmanship, and the times of germination and fruition.

It may be said as it often has been said that God neither made us sinful nor holy, but simply innocent. I need only remind my readers that God's work ceases not when a child is born. He made my beard as truly as my heart; Napoleon's thirst for empire as truly as his thirst for his mother's milk. Counting from the first moment of individual existence, he usually requires twenty or twenty-five years