nature, and so the entirely other relation with the Divine which that autonomy makes possible. Did the Divine Will occupy the field of our will, we should conform to it as winds and seas and stars now do, but we could not proffer it our surrender. We should involuntarily yield to it, but we should not voluntarily obey it. Resignation, aspiration, free affection, the crowning graces of the human, by that ever determining Divine Will would be made impossible. We should be another species of automata, exercising no causality, and so knowing none. The recognition of the Divine Will would be made impossible by its constancy and pervasiveness. The feeling is irresistibly borne in upon us that in calling man into existence God intended that there should be one being in the universe that might render him a free obedience; and that to this end he placed him over against himself outside the scope of his immanent volition. Is it objected that in this view God favors the lower ranges of being with his immediate guidance, but takes his Holy Presence from the higher? gives to planets no choice but to obey him, and leaves man to the possibility of sin? That possibility is essential to man's distinguishing glory. Because the Higher Will does not rule through our struggle a victor's crown may be won by us. Besides, as Dr. Martineau urges, this absence is in only one aspect, and to the end that, in another, he may bestow his Presence. Absent is he as a constraint, but present as a personal sympathy and affection. While through his Immanence he deals with all else, from the sphere of his Transcendence he bends to man. It is our aspirations that go upward, our prayers that we pray; it is we ourselves that are tempted and strive for the higher joy. Yet in all our aspiring and wrestling we are not apart from him. Withdrawn from us as a law, he meets us as a friend to reinforce our courage, to comfort our griefs, and to woo us upward.

CHAPTER V

FREEDOM AND IMMORTALITY

I. Freedom

THERE are many arguments against Free Will; for it there is one. With Calvin and Edwards we may maintain its incompatibility with Divine Decrees; with Hartley and Priestley we may surrender it before the Law of Association; with Comte and the positivists we may find no place for it in the sequences of phenomenal causation; with Spinoza and the pantheists we may conceive man but a mode of a universal Substance, and what he miscalls his freedom to be ruled by its necessity. All these doctrines may be so presented as to make the affirmation of Free Will look quite foolish. On the other hand the apostle of freedom has one argument which he deems conclusive, and which three words can state: Consciousness declares it. Here in consciousness, where we gain a first-hand acquaintance with the will, and receive its testimony respecting itself, its freedom is unmistakably avouched to us. "If bound," it says, "I know nothing of the gyves." That we exercise a preferential part, determine upon this as against that, in the presence of alternatives choose, rather than are constrained to, one of them, accepting the testimony of consciousness, we can but say we know. Accordingly, while the advocate of Free Will contents himself with maintaining the necessary trustworthiness of consciousness, and with showing how the experiences of life may be harmonized with its oracle, the

determinist puts forth the arguments of his school, and then undertakes to discredit consciousness. Discrediting consciousness, however, is serious business; for, being our witness to many things besides freedom, on the principle, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, doubting its testimony as to freedom involves us in a paralyzing scepticism. Further, it is perfectly plain that the doctrine of Necessity, however cogently argued, cannot, since it is out of accord with consciousness, carry the full force of a practical conviction. In the toil, study, play of life, in its right doing and its wrong doing, we have the certitude that we act, not as we must, but as we will; and by no inference from any theory of the universe can the significance of this certitude be destroyed.

The controversy being thus one of theory versus consciousness, there pertains to it this further aspect: The oracles of consciousness are to be asserted rather than argued; the theories by which we will confute them are to be argued rather than asserted. The former are selfevident until discredited; the latter, in that they are arrayed against consciousness, are discredited until proven to the overthrow of consciousness. Were I, giving account of myself, to say I am well, and another to contradict me, No, you are not well, I might think him trifling with me; or, if a physician, I might suspect him to see in my eyes, or in my breathing, or in the expression of my countenance, some incipient ill. Beyond the general assertion, however, that I feel well, I obviously could not go; and it would be for him to show the latent disease my feelings up to date have not allowed me to suspect. Were one calling himself a prophet to appear, proclaiming a universal bad health, and teaching that the general feeling of good health is an illusion, very likely he would win converts; indeed, the Invalidinarians might speedily become a numerous sect among us. Probably, however,

there would be doubting ones who would query how the conditions and feeling peculiar to good health can coexist with an ever-present and all-pervading invalidism; and who would be so unreasonable as not to call the doctor till their consciousness of health had been shown to be delusive? So where the universal consciousness of freedom is challenged, the burden of proof, or rather of disproof, is on the determinist side. It is in full recognition of this feature of the discussion that Dr. Martineau bears his part in it. The consciousness that affirms freedom he holds should be trusted until its veracity has been successfully impugned; which he has no suspicion that it ever has been, and clearly doubts if it ever can be. Accordingly, in his wonderful discussion of this problem he assumes Free Will, and devotes his great thought and learning to shattering antagonistic doctrines. If any one thinks he has an unanswered argument against Free Will, if he will turn to this discussion he may probably find himself mistaken. Not that Dr. Martineau's attitude is wholly defensive: he has made many a sally into the enemy's camp with no end of destruction of the machinery of argumentative war; but his general method is to expose the weakness of necessarian doctrines rather than to buttress the alternative one. He holds that until the latter is discredited, it must stand; that no mere plausibility of theory can be allowed to prevail against a clearly authenticated fact of consciousness.

But the question is asked, What signifies the endless controversy over this insoluble problem? So far as we can see, like wisdom is found on either side; and whether with freedom or necessity, virtue and depravity seem to prosper. If we were to judge its significance thus, by the personal and average worth of those who take sides upon it, we might indeed be tempted to call truce to the strife; 1 Study of Religion, vol. ii. pp. 184 seq.

though still it would be gravely doubted whether character could indefinitely prosper on a doctrine that gives the lie to the clearest dictum of the interior nature. The bearings of the discussion, however, run wide of the question of personal character: the outlook upon the universe, the mental construction which it yields to libertarian and necessarian, is entirely different. Grant to each the like certificate of good morals, we must yet discriminate between the worlds they live in. While to the latter freedom is a conclusion he cannot draw out of his postulates, to the former it is a datum which his postulates imply. While the one subordinates the inner life to a rule of necessity which he finds abroad, the other carries abroad a freedom found at home and interprets the world in its light. Of the preceding pages, there are few indeed that would not need to be rewritten to make them the consistent utterance of a necessarian. Let alone his Ethics, of which freedom is a constitutive principle, he must be a superficial reader who does not see that Dr. Martineau's firm conviction of freedom signifies greatly even in the domain of Critical Theology. It is not too much to say, indeed it is clearly obvious, that prior to his conversion from the determinism which he early held, he could not have written the Seat of Authority in Religion, could all the learned data have been given him. To the apostle of freedom the Bible cannot yield the same meaning as to the apostle of necessity, and Christ must be a different teacher. The great themes of Christian doctrine, in any thorough treatment of them, will surely reflect the thinker's attitude on this vexed problem. When we set aside the testimony of consciousness, man becomes another being, and his record has another meaning. In wrestling with this problem, therefore, the theologian is settling with a consideration, and that a very important one, by which his judgments must