anticipating defenses against his logic which had not been as yet set up. He was anxious to demolish forts even before they were erected. His habit of taking up all conceivable objections to the proposition which he advocates, in advance of the opponent, is one main source of his strength as a disputant. He not only fires his own gun, but spikes that of the enemy. It is far from being true that Edwards was the first to assert the impropriety of the term "necessary" as a predicate of acts of will, on the ground that necessity presupposes an opposition of the will, which, of course, is precluded when the occurrence in question is itself a choice. I am constrained to that to which my will is opposed, but which nevertheless occurs. That is necessary "which choice can not prevent." 99* The same objection is made to the terms "irresistible," "unavoidable," "inevitable," "unable," and their synonyms, as descriptive of the determinations of the will. I do not find in Augustine this criticism of the above-mentioned terms in any explicit form; yet there lurks continually under his statements the feeling that underlies this criticism; as, for instance, when he speaks of "the most blessed necessity" of not sinning, under which the Deity is placed, "if necessity it is to be called "— "si necessitas dicenda est." But the objection to all terms implying coercion, especially to the word "necessity," is set forth by Thomas Aquinas as clearly as by Edwards. "That which is moved by another," writes Thomas, "is said to be constrained (cogi), if it is moved against its own inclination (contra inclinationem propriam); but if it be moved by another which gives to it its own inclination (quod sibi dat propriam inclinationem), it is not said to be constrained. . . . So God in moving the will does not constrain it, because he gives to it its own inclination. To be moved voluntarily is to be moved of one's self, that is, from an internal principle; but that intrinsic principle can be moved by another principle extrinsic; and so to be moved of one's self is not inconsistent with being moved by another." It is the doctrine of Edwards, then, that the will is determined by "that view of the mind which has the greatest degree of previous tendency to excite volition."§ This antecedent mental state secures the result by a strictly causal efficiency. Moral necessity is distinguished from the natural necessity that prevails in material Edwards's "Works," vol. ii., p. 84. + Op. imp., i., 103. nature, in that the former is concerned with mental phenomena, with motives and the volitions which they produce; but the difference "does not lie so much in the nature of the connection, as in the two terms connected."* It is cause and effect in both cases. To the objection that morality and responsibility are subverted by this doctrine, Edwards replies that men are responsible for their choices, no matter what the causes of them may be; that moral quality inheres in the choices themselves, and not in their causes. As liberty "does not consider anything of the cause of the choice,"t so it is with moral accountableness, with merit and ill-desert. Sufficient that the choice exists in the man as an operation of will. On no other hypothesis than the necessitarian did Edwards think it possible to hold to the omniscience of God and his universal providence and government. Principles which freethinkers maintained for other ends, he defended as the indispensable foundations of religion. Edwards came forward as the champion of Calvinism against Whitby and its other English assailants. He scattered to the winds the loosely defined notions of free-will which made it include the choosing of choices, and choice from a previous indifference, or apart from all influence of motives. It is not true that, out of various possible choices, the mind decides upon, i. e., chooses one. Nor is it true that the act of choice starts into being independently of induccments. Although his adversaries must have felt that he took advantage of the infirmities of language, and confuted what they said rather than what they meant, yet it is quite untrue that he was guilty of any conscious unfairness. He was not the man purposely to surround himself with "mist, the common gloss Of theologians." He had no faith in their conception of freedom, however it might be formulated. But, in prosecuting his purpose, Edwards set up a philosophy of the will which is not consonant with the doctrine that had been held by the main body of Augustinian theologians. It is true that the Wittenberg Reformers, at the outset, and Calvin, in his earlier writings, especially the "Institutes," pushed predestination to the supralapsarian extreme. The doctrine of Augustine, however, and the more general doctrine even of Cal† P. 39, cf., p. 191. P. 186 seq. (Part IV., § 1). * Ibid., p. 34. vinistic theologians, the doctrine of Calvin himself, and of the Westminster Assembly's creeds, is that a certain liberty of will ad utrumvis, or the power of contrary choice, had belonged to the first man, but had disappeared in the act of transgression, which brought his will into bondage to evil. It was the common doctrine, too, that in mankind now, while the will is enslaved as regards religious obedience, it remains free outside of this province, in all civil and secular concerns. In this wide domain the power of contrary choice still subsists. But Edwards's conception of the will admits of no such distinction. Freedom is as predicable of men now as of Adam before he sinned; of religious morality as of the affairs of worldly business; of man as of God. He asserts most emphatically that he holds men to be possessed now of all the liberty which it is possible to imagine, or which it ever entered into the heart of any man to conceive. * Of course, there can have been no loss of liberty, no forfeiture of a prerogative once possessed. Philosophical necessity belongs to the very nature of the will. Therefore, it binds all spiritual beings alike. This is not the philosophy of Augustine or of the Westminster divines. They held to a mutability of will once belonging to man, but now lost; to a freedom pertaining at present to men in one sphere of action, but not in another. Refraining, for the present, from comments on the drift of this philosophical creed, we follow this acute and powerful thinker into another but adjacent field. Not satisfied with the timid, halfhearted way in which Watts, Doddridge, and other English Calvinists of that day, had attenuated the doctrine of original sin, in deference to the attacks of the Arminians, Edwards undertook to reclaim the ground which had been surrendered, and to put to rout the confident assailants. For their "glorying and insults" he believed there was no foundation. † He took up a great theme, belonging alike to philosophy and theology, the dominion of moral evil in the race of mankind. It can not be said that he does not squarely grapple with his adversaries. He fully understood himself, and had the courage which comes from undoubting conviction. invited for his arguments the closest scrutiny, and only deprecated the objection that they were "metaphysical," as vague and impertinent. "The question is not," he on one occasion remarks, "whether what is said be metaphysics, physics, logic, or mathematics, Latin, English, French, or Mohawk, but whether the reasoning be good + Dwight's "Life," p. 569. * Vol. ii., p. 298. He and the arguments truly conclusive."* His ardor is a white heat which never moves him to substitute declamation for reasoning. In this treatise on "Original Sin," he blinks no difficulties; but, having established by cogent reasoning and by Scripture, with appeals to heathen as well as Christian authority, the tremendous fact of sin, as a universal characteristic of mankind, he endeavors to prove that men are truly, and not by any legal fiction, judged to be sinful from the start, and literally guilty of the primal transgression. To this end, he seeks to bring the continuance of sin in the individuals of the race, onward from the beginning of their personal life, under the familiar law of habit. It is analogous to the self-perpetuation of any habit which arises from an initial act. To prove that Adam's act was our act, he launches out into a bold speculation on the nature of identity. Personal identity, he asserts, is the effect of the divine will and ordinance. If it consists in the sameness of consciousness, that is kept up by divine acts from moment to moment. If it be thought to consist in the sameness of substance, even this is due to the perpetual divine preservation; and preservation is not to be distinguished from constantly repeated acts of creation. Our identity is a constituted identity, dependent upon the creative will, and in this sense arbitrary, yet conformed to an idea of order. So the individuals of the human race are the continuation of Adam; they truly-that is, by the will and appointment of God-constitute one moral whole. It is strictly true that all participated in the act by which "the species first rebelled against God." We are not condemned for another's evil choice, but for our own, and the principle of sin within us is only the natural consequence of that original act. Time counts for nothing: the first rising of evil inclination in us is one and the same with the first rising of evil inclination in Adam; it is the members participating in, and consenting to, the act of the head. The habit of sinning follows upon this first rising of evil inclination, in us as in Adam. Such is the constitution of things; and on the divine constitution, the persistence of individuality, of personal consciousness and identity, equally depends. It is to be noticed that, in defense of his realistic theory, Edwards does not lay hold of the traducian hypothesis of the evolution of souls. He admits that souls are created; but so are consciousness and the substance of our individual being at every successive instant of time. Like Anselm, and the * Vol. ii., p. 474. + Vol. ii., p. 543. schoolmen generally, he is a creationist. It is evident that Locke's curious chapter on "Identity and Diversity"* put Edwards on the track on which he advanced to these novel opinions. Locke there attempts to prove that sameness of consciousness is the sole bond of identity, and that identity would remain were consciousness disjoined from one substance and connected with another. Edwards's opinion is peculiar to himself, but there is no reason to doubt that the initial impulse to the reflections that issued in it was imparted by the discussion of Locke. We turn now to the ethical theory of Edwards. In his masterly treatise on the "Nature of True Virtue," he does not content himself, as philosophers before him had so often done, with the inquiry, What is the abstract quality of virtue, or the foundation of moral obligation? but he sets forth the nature of virtue in the concrete, or the principle of goodness. This he finds to be benevolence, or love to intelligent being. It is love to the entire society of intelligent beings according to their rank, or, to use his phrase, "the amount of being" which belongs to them. It is thus a proportionate love; supreme and absolute as regards God, limited as regards inferior beings. Under this conception, ethics and religion are inseparably connected. True love to man is love to him as being, or as having being in himself, and is indissolubly connected, if it be real and genuine, with a proportionately greater love to God. This benevolence, which embraces in itself all goodness, is the fountain and essence of specific virtues. It is described as a propensity to being, a union of heart to intelligent being, a consent to being, which prompts one to seek the welfare of the objects loved. It is not synonymous with delight in the happiness of others, but is the spring of that delight. Now, he who actually exercises this love delights in the same love when it is seen in others; and this delight induces and involves an additional love to them, the love of complacency. There is a spiritual beauty in benevolence which is perceived only through experience. The relish which this beauty excites and gratifies is possible only to him who is himself benevolent. There is a rectitude in benevolence, a fitness to the nature of the soul and the nature of things; and the perception of this rectitude awakens the sense of obligation, and binds all men to be benevolent. The natural conscience makes a man uneasy "in the consciousness of doing that to others which he should be angry *Book ii., c. 27. |