a condition most remote from a state of freedom. There is no medium between these two opposite conditions; for it is utterly unmeaning to talk of indifference being essential to a state of liberty. For an intelligent being to be indifferent to truth, he must become an idiot, or, rather, indeed, be annihilated; and the moral being, who is indif ferent to virtuous conduct, if not enthralled by a degrading necessity, is just at the point which separates servitude from freedom, and is lost to virtue, if not abandoned to vice. To consider indifference as necessary to freedom is to forget a first principle of the right mode of philosophizing, and to borrow our conceptions of moral beings from the equilibrium of a balance, and not from the nature of the beings themselves. The more firmly and immutably a moral agent is attached to moral rectitude, the greater is his moral power and the greater becomes his moral liberty. We say of our friend, whose character we admire and on whose firm and unwavering principle we rely with perfect confidence, that he cannot commit such and such a crime; and we well know that the strength of his generous and pious feelings renders any act of meanness morally impossible; but that, in given circumstances, he will, with absolute certainty, act in a manner becoming himself. If it be otherwise, it is a proof of his weakness and degradation, and of the moral imperfection of his present condition. The

conduct of the Deity alone, as possessed of infinite physical, moral and intellectual power, and, therefore, infinitely free, is immutably determined. Had man, in like manner, kept his first estate and acted upon the law of his constitution, his conduct, with respect to his Creator and his fellow-creatures, had been determined for eternity, when, by the inspiration of God, he became a living soul; and never would he have been, as he now is, enthralled by the galling yoke of a degrading necessity.

Mr. Locke, though he did not fully under stand the doctrine of liberty, was too sound a philosopher, and too well acquainted with human nature, to conceive the fact of existence incom. patible with freedom. "Is it worth the name of freedom," he indignantly demands, "to be at liberty to play the fool and draw shame and misery upon a man's self? If to break loose from the conduct of reason, and to want that restraint of examination and judgment which keeps us from choosing and doing the worse, be liberty, madmen and fools are the only freemen. But yet, I think, nobody would choose to be mad for the sake of such liberty, but he that is mad already. The constant desire of happiness, and the constraint it puts upon us to act for it, nobody, I think, accounts an abridgement of liberty; or, at least, an abridgement of liberty to be complained of. God Almighty himself is under

the necessity of being happy; and the more any intelligent being is so, the nearer is its approach to infinite perfection and happiness."

This is the true doctrine of liberty. That the Deity is infinitely wise and holy, and perfectly happy, are matters of fact; which must be, simply because they are. "I am that I am," the name by which Jehovah revealed himself to Moses, states the whole doctrine of this necessity. The more any intelligent and moral creature resembles his Creator in these attributes, the higher his perfection and the greater his freedom. The enlightened understanding and the holy heart truly constitute the freeman. When an intelligent being perceives true what is true, and right what is really right, he is under no necessity which is not necessarily implied in the fact, that he is; and from which, therefore, he can be delivered only by annihilation. But who would be annihilated in order to escape so glorious a necessity? It is nothing but the delightful fact, that the Eternal has called us out of dreary nothing to constitute a part, and no contemptible part, of his moral universe, and to share that intelligence and holiness which form the strength and the beauty of his own moral character. Away then for ever with the hateful name and doctrine of necessity, dishonourable to God and degrading to man, of which the very

* Human Understanding, Book II. Chap. 21. § 50.

suspicion strikes at the root of all the moral worth of the universe, and chokes every generous and grateful emotion. Let the man whom the divine Redeemer has made free rejoice in his freedom, with joy unspeakable and full of glory, knowing that by the grace of God he now is, and henceforth, secured by the power and faithfulness of his Redeemer, shall be coeval with his Creator.

SECTION IV.

MAN, IN THe exercise OF HIS UNDERSTANDING, IS OCCASIONALLY UNABLE TO REGULATE THE DETERMINATIONS OF HIS WILL; THAT IS, IS SUBJECT TO MORAL NECESSITY.

We have now considered man as an animal, a moral and an intellectual being, and we have found that in all these characters he is possessed of freedom. As an animal or voluntary agent, he is free, because he acts as he wills; as a moral agent, because he wills as he judges right; and thus it has appeared that the whole question of liberty is ultimately to be resolved into the plain fact, that man is an intelligent and thinking being. We next proceed to inquire whether his liberty is subject to limitations.

As a finite being, his intellectual and voluntary freedom are of course limited, though not thereby necessarily imperfect and incomplete; for as an intelligent being, he is not conceived to attempt, like Icarus, to rival the flight of the eagle, or like the giants, to pile Ossa on Pelion to scale the heavens; and if he know all that concerns his present and future security and happiness, and is able to execute all his volitions, he enjoys