respect to the means, the instrument, and the moral agents concerned in it.

Now it is this knowledge of the necessary connexion between the means and the end, the cause and the effect, the motive and the action, the knowledge, in fact, of the true relations of things, which Dr. Copleston imagines must lead to the destruction of all motive, and consequently of all mental activity. He does not tell us how this result will take place, but seems to exult in it as a wondrous metaphysical discovery, that where the doctrine of necessity or of Calvinistic predestination is firmly believed, the tendency is to destroy motive; and consequently, on that hypothesis, a continual progress in knowledge must terminate in absolute inactivity. In every point of view, the supposition is false, and the inference absurd. Push to its utmost the doc trine of metaphysical necessity, and you can never identify it with fatalism. Again, carry the knowledge of things as ne cessitated by their causes, or a discovery of the true relations of things according to that hypothesis, to the utmost conceivable perfection, and it can never become foreknowledge; to which alone, as we have shewn, the objection would apply, of its tending to destroy motive. But even foreknowledge itself has not necessarily this effect. As a perfection of Deity, it is infinitely compatible with all the active energies of the Divine nature. And there is no reason to imagine that any communications of foreknowledge of which a finite nature is susceptible, would necessarily have the effect of rendering the subject of those communications less active. Dr. Copleston, and his master, Mr. Dawson, are both chargeable with a strange oversight in arguing from the operation of certain notions on a depraved nature, to what must be the effect of the same principles in a perfect or holy nature. The conduct of the fatalist and of the antinomian in neglecting the means because the event is decreed, is nothing better than palpable folly; such folly as cannot have place in a future state where our faculties will be enlarged, our understandings ' enlightened, and our apprehensions quickened.' It is, however, something worse than folly or unreasonableness: it betrays a disinclination to the prescribed means of duty, which is incompatible with virtue. It proceeds from a diseased, if not a depraved mind, from a disordered state of the affections. If fatalism has any tendency to breed a disregard of religious duties, or Calvinism a disregard of moral duties, as Dr. Copleston ventures to affirm, it cannot be because there are no sufficient motives to the performance of those duties, but because there is a vicious disinclination to them, which overcomes the force of the proper motives. Let the nature be made good and holy, and no such result could take place. The certainty of a good has no tendency to lessen in a holy mind the desire of enjoying it; nor will the

security of the blessed in the future world destroy their inducements to holy obedience and boundless activity.

We cannot dismiss this first discourse without briefly adverting to a strangely incorrect assertion which occurs at p. 21. In proving, what we are not aware that any body has been. found to deny, that the moral quality of actions depends upon the freedom of the agent, the Author says:

So with regard to good actions, as soon as it is found that they are not spontaneous-that some secret bias or impulse made it impossible' for the person to withhold the good he has done,-we even grudge the praise and admiration which his conduct may have before extorted from

There is a sense, we admit, in which this may hold good, if, by secret bias or impulse, the Author means a sinister or unworthy motive, which vitiates the moral quality of the good action; although how even a bad motive should render the action less spontaneous, we are at a loss to understand. But Dr. Copleston in speaking of an impulse or bias which renders it impossible for the individual to act otherwise, must mean something more than this. His words clearly imply some kind of moral necessity; and what can this be, but a bias arising from the habits or dispositions of the mind? And since it is, by the supposition, a good action which is thus necessitated, the necessitating cause must be good also. Here then we have the monstrous assertion, that in proportion as our practical principles grow stronger, and habits of virtue are formed within us, and the mind receives from the Divine Spirit a bias to holiness, which renders it impossible for him to commit sin, "because "he is born of God,"-in that same proportion we become less entitled to the praise and admiration of our fellow creatures for the good actions we may render them. Good habits interfere with spontaneity! A secret bias to virtue destroys the freedom of the agent! Such is the Arminian scheme of morals. By the same rule, a confirmed thief, or drunkard, is less deserving of blame and detestation in proportion to the strength of the secret bias or impulse which governs him; and the more violent are a man's passions, the more excusable is he for indulging them. Thus, at every stage of moral inability, the sinner's demerit and his accountableness lessen, till at length, when his bias to evil becomes invincible, he stands altogether acquitted of criminality, having ceased, according to the Arminian logic, to be a free agent.

We must very briefly advert to the arguments in the following discourses. Our readers have seen with what success the Author has made good his attack upon Calvinism: in the second discourse, he undertakes, with equal advantage to his cause, to fortify his own positions. After remarking, that the conduct of

those who consult gipsies and astrologers about future events, is more rational than the creed of the Necessarian,'-an assertion worthy of going down to posterity along with Bishop Tomline's memorable proof that Simon Magus was a Calvinist,

Dr. Copleston proceeds to anticipate a very natural objection against his Theological notions, that they are inconsistent ⚫ with the language habitually employed by religious men to ⚫ denote their sense of the supernatural agency exerted in the world.' This objection is much more ingenuously admitted than skilfully parried. Dr. Copleston tries to throw the difficulty attaching to his own crude and baseless hypothesis, off from himself to the inscrutable nature of the subject. And he makes a most dangerous concession to the infidel, by admitting that the doctrine of God's providence is apparently incompatible with the freedom of human actions. On this point, he but echoes the sentiment of Bishop Tomline, whose words are: We are utterly incapable of comprehending how God's pre⚫ science consists with the other attributes of the Deity and ⚫ with the free agency of man.' But this imaginary difficulty was confessed long before by Descartes, who proposed the same way of getting rid of it, by replying to the objector, That we are assured of the providence of God by reason, but that we are also assured of our liberty by the internal consciousness that we are free; that we must therefore believe both proposi tions, though we perceive no means of reconciling them; and must not abandon ascertained truths, because we are unable to perceive their relations to other known truths. This, remarks Leibnitz, was to cut the Gordian knot, not to untie it. But then, it is a knot of the philosopher's own making. Bayle with his usual acuteness lays hold of this admission, and replies, that the alleged difficulty does not arise, as the Cartesians represent, from our want of light, but from the knowledge that we have, and with which we cannot make these doctrines agree. His object is, to overturn the argument in support of the existence of freewill, drawn from consciousness: and he attempts to dispute the spontaneity of our actions. On this Leibnitz remarks, that his sceptical reasoning reminds him of Lord Bacon's words, that a shallow draught of philosophy alienates us from God, but that those are brought back again who dive to the bottom. Dr. Copleston makes an important concession, which is directly in point. It is not,' he says, 'till they involve themselves in metaphysical perplexities, that men regard these things as incompatible with the acknowledged attributes of God, or with the free-will of man.'

The plain Christian will be amazed to hear that there is any difficulty in the case. The two doctrines of Divine Providence

and human freedom are, in his mind, perfectly compatible. And so they are to the Calvinist. The whole difficulty arises out of the Arminian hypothesis; and is it fair or decorous, to charge the absurdity involved in that mode of philosophising, on the inscrutability of the subject? Tucker states the supposed dilemma thus: An universal providence disposing all events ⚫ without exception, leaves no room for freedom. But there is such a providence; therefore no freedom: or, on the other side, there is a freedom of the will, therefore no such providence, In this passage, on which Dr. Copleston bestows high praise, it is taken for granted, that the Calvinist denies the freedom of the will, in the sense of free agency ;-a manifest fallacy or palpable misrepresentation, since he denies only the Arminian chimera of a freedom consisting in a certain impossible equilibrium or indifference. No Calvinist attaches any such mean⚫ing to the word foreknowledge, or providence, as excludes the notion of freedom in the will or the actions of man.' All Dr. Copleston's remarks, therefore, which assume this, fall to the ground as alike (to use his own terms) unreasonable' and' arrogant.'

Aut voluntas non est, aut libera dicenda est,* is the language of Augustine: and again, Aguntur ut agant, non ut ipsi nihil agant.+ We know of no Calvinist who would object to either of these. propositions. Only, as Edwards remarks, liberty, strictly speaking, cannot apply to the will, but rather to the agent exerting that will. For what is free choice but a person's freely choosing? The only objection to the phrase free-will, is, that it is deficient in philosophical correctness; but taken in the sense of free agency, it must at once be admitted to be essential to accountableness. Freedom is the condition of a voluntary agent, in which he has the power or the opportunity of doing what he chooses. It implies the absence of restraint or compulsion. We defy Dr. Copleston to prove that any other species of free-will is possible. How a universal providence disposing all events without exception, interferes with free agency, has never been shewn. It is by means of the free agency of man, that the " determinate counsel" and purpose of God are accomplished. It is as free agents, that the Almighty deals with us alike in the dispensations of his moral government, and in the communication of his grace, which is irresistible only because the will itself freely yields to the Divine influence. That he foresees how the creatures he has made will

Either the will does not exist, or it must be said to be free,
Men are acted upon that they may act, not that they may do nothing.

freely act, and that he predetermines how he will himself act towards them, and that all things will take place according to this fixed purpose, yet, neither by any necessity laid on himself, nor by any constraint laid on the creature,-this, we say, is in itself so free from incongruity, so perfectly in unison with both reason and consciousness, so consonant with the practical sense of mankind, as well as so completely the doctrine of the Holy Scriptures,-that we can conceive of no process of reasoning by which it is capable of being invalidated. We anticipate but one insurmountable objection to it, namely, that it is Calvinism.

But Dr. Copleston admits, that his notion of free-will is obviously incompatible, at least in appearance, with the doctrine of Divine Providence, and at war with the convictions of religious men. His own notions of Providence are, indeed, evidently obscured and perplexed by the muddy metaphysics he has embraced; since he can propose no better way of reconciling a controlling superintendence with the free agency of the creature, than by the supposition, that this controlling power may be kept in reserve to act upon occasions,-may form the plan and the outline, and delegate the subordinate parts to minor agents.' This appears to us to make Providential agency to consist, in all cases, in an interference with free agency: it is to substitute an occasional interposition in the place of a constant energy. It involves also the contradiction, that what is true of the whole, is not true of the subordinate parts; and that there are events exempted from the prescience of God, yet necessarily included in it. All these errors, and they are errors of no common magnitude or danger, are entailed by the supposition, that the Divine prescience, or predetermination, cannot be reconciled with the contingency of events as respects the agent, or that what is certain to God, cannot be freely brought about by man.

The Arminian notion of free-will is not, however, more incompatible with the Divine prescience, than it is with man's free agency. The indifference of equilibrium, the total freedom from bias, in which they place it, is simply, as Leibnitz has acutely remarked, a power to act without reason, The being possessed of this strange prerogative cannot, it is plain, be the subject of a moral probation, since no act of his will proceeds from any thing in himself; his behaviour, therefore, neither shews what is in his heart, nor is an exercise of it. His acting right or wrong is no proof of any good or bad disposition determining his conduct, nor can any change in his character ensure the good or bad moral qualities of his future actions. Such a being is free, as a madman is free, in whose actions there must be allowed to exist the perfection of both