Amid much obscurity and diversity in their account of the nature of free-will, a doctrine of liberty has, with few exceptions, till recent times, been maintained by the most religious and earnest of our British philosophers. Cudworth and Clarke attacked the opposite hypothesis of necessity as a citadel of the Atheists and Materialists of that age, and as interwoven with the speculations of Hobbes and also of Spinoza. In the eighteenth century, the assault on free-will was conducted by the Unitarians Priestley and Belsham, and the system of necessity has since been used by the Socialists and Communists of our own times, as a popular engine for the defence of their doctrines. It is also important to note that the modern doctrine of universal necessity is apparently at variance with what is said concerning free-will, and particularly with the prominence which is given to the fall, in the doctrinal symbols of the Reformation. These creeds assume the possibility of a free-will, when they assert that human freedom was lost, “as to any spiritual good accompanying salvation,” in the fall of Adam.[1] The loss of freedom clearly implies the possibility of it, for
- ↑ See, as illustrations, the tenth of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and the ninth chapter of the Westminster Confession, or symbol of the doctrine of the Presbyterian Churches of Scotland. In the latter document, we read expressly that "man in his state of innocency had freedom and power to will and to do," &c. The condition of the fallen human will is a distinct province of discussion. Some of the problems that may he raised in this latter department may he found, inter cilia, in a rather curious little book, Everard's "Creation and Fall of Adam Reviewed, or a Brief Treatise wherein is discovered Adam's indowments in his Creation, and what he became by Degeneration." London, 1649.
