Granted, that the man is 'free,' that his sin is his own fault, yet why does he have faults? Let it be assumed that at each time of making a choice, what was chosen depended on the man himself, and even that, with just his character, it might have been other than it was, yet if he has chosen wrong, and his Creator foreknew this would be so, why was the opportunity for the fall given him? Still, with Omar Khayyam, we may protest:
"O Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken'd—Man's forgiveness give—and take!"
Secondly, a universe in which all events should not be causally related to antecedent facts is to us absolutely unthinkable. A world of unrelated phenomena is a self-contradictory conception, which melts away as the mind tries to realize it. The world of experience is a coordinated system, a cosmos, all the parts of which stand in necessary connection with all the rest. In the ethical sphere, as in all other departments of knowledge, we find this inter-relation of parts, each dependent on others, each known only by the discovery of its numerous relations to others; to ignore or deny the fact of these relations is to obstruct the path of moral progress and to reduce ethics to the position of a pseudo-science.
E. Ritchie.
