If this be so, it was no free-will offering of our fathers, but was wrenched from them by force.

In it are discussed all the great theological questions treated by Saint Augustine,God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, grace, predestination, faith, free-will, Providence, and the like,blended with metaphysical discussions on the soul, the existence of evil, the nature of angels, and other subjects which interested the Middle Ages.

In further proof of this we found, in a drawer in the captain's room, a considerable quantity of loose gold, the which it was not to be supposed would have been left by the free-will of the owner.

'Sitting on a hill apart,' my host and I were discoursing, not 'of fate, free-will, free-knowledge absolute,' but of a question almost as mysteriousthe doings of the Parasol-ants who marched up and down their trackways past us, and whether these doings were guided by an intellect differing from ours, only in degree, but not in kind.

Men as well as nations are endowed with free-will to choose a principle, but, that once chosen, the consequences must be accepted.

FREE-WILL AND FATALISM.

so long he thinketh he hath a free-will which is able to do something; but, when want and need appeareth, that there is neither to eat nor to drink, neither money nor provision, where is then the free will?

It is of vital importance for a theological student to understand clearly the utter diversity of the Lutheran, which is likewise the Calvinistic, denial of free-will in the unregenerate, and the doctrine of the modern Necessitarians and ('proh pudor!') of the later Calvinists, which denies the proper existence of will altogether.

Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the appetites, passions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness;that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost.

Most of the time at the Free-Will Baptist churchat morning service, prayer-meetings, and such.

Is it possible for man to be so extravagant as to dare to contradict his own conscience about his free-will, lest he should be forced to acknowledge his God and maker?

I had acted for the bestso let God who gave me free-will, intelligence, conscience and opportunity, approve the deed or take the blame.

It is, indeed, avowed by those who reduce man in nature, that upon the admission of free-will, the objection to the miraculous is over, and that it is absurd to allow exception to law in man, and reject it in nature.

Does free agency stop at the human stage, or is there a sphere of free-will above the human, in which, as in the human, not physical law but spirit moves matter?

And does that free-will penetrate the universal frame invisibly to us, an omnipresent agent?

The simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded by either.

Sir W. Hamilton declares that both the one doctrine and the other are inconceivable and incomprehensible; yet that, by the law of Excluded Middle, one or other of them must be true: and he decides in favour of Free-will, of which he believes himself to be distinctly conscious; moreover, Free-will is essential (he thinks) to moral responsibility, of which also he feels himself conscious.

'To be conscious of Free-will, must mean to be conscious, before I have decided, that I am able to decide either way; exception may be taken in limine to the use of the word consciousness in such an application.

On arriving there I was ushered into the imposing presence of the Free-will Baptist minister for examination; then I was made aware that although I had plenty of Greek and Latin, I was woefully uninstructed in the rudiments of our mother tongue, and was saved only by the fact that my cousin was the largest contributor to the dominie's salary.

If, when I know, I consider that my dear father was right, I shall of my own free-will sell the land, and divest myself of the proceeds.

BRAMHALL, JOHN, archbishop of Armagh, born in Yorkshire, a high-handed Churchman and imitator of Laud; was foolhardy enough once to engage, nowise to his credit, in public debate with such a dialectician as Thomas Hobbes on the questions of necessity and free-will (1594-1663).

CASSIANUS, JOANNUS, an Eastern ascetic; came to Constantinople, and became a pupil of Chrysostom, who ordained him; founded two monasteries in Marseilles; opposed the extreme views of Augustine in regard to grace and free-will, and human depravity; and not being able to go the length of Pelaganism, adopted SEMI-PELAGIANISM, q. v. (360-448).

The question of free-will has at sundry times and seasons, and by champions many and furious, been disputed, till the ground about it is all beaten into blinding dust, wherein no reasonable man can now desire to cloud his eyes and clog his lungs.

The notion of Chance, he says, is the same with that of Free-Will; the doctrine of Necessary Connection with the dogma of Predestination.

To assert the identity of chance and free-will is but another way of saying that pure freedom is one and the same with absolute lawlessness,that where freedom exists, law, order, reason do not.