FREE WILL

Since the introduction of Calvin ism many persons have been led into perplexity on this subject, by not sufficiently distinguishing between the free will of spontaneous mental preference, and the good will of freely preferring virtue to vice. By the ancients, on the contrary, who were frequently called upon to oppose the mischievous impiety of fatalism, while yet they stood pledged to maintain the vital doctrine of Divine grace, this distinction was well known and carefully observed. The Manicheans so denied free will, as to hold a fatal nece ity of sinning, whether the choice of the individual did or did not go along with the action. The Pelagians so held free will, as to deny the need of Divine grace to make that free will a good will. By the Catholics, each of these systems was alike rejected. They held, that man po e es free will; for, otherwise, he could not be an accountable subject of God’s moral government. But they also held, that, in consequence of the fall, his free will was a bad will: whence, with a perfect conscious freedom of choice or preference, and without any violence put upon his inclination, he, perpetually, though quite spontaneously, prefers unholine to holine ; and thus requires the aid of Divine grace to make his bad will a good will. The reader may see this point established by quotations from the Fathers in Faber’s work on “Election,” from which this article is taken. He shows also that the doctrine taught by Augustine and the ancients, is precisely that which is maintained by the reformers of our Anglican Church. Those venerable and well-informed moderns resolve not our evil actions into the compulsory fatal nece ity of Manicheism, on the one hand; nor, on the other hand, according to the presumptuous scheme of Pelagian ism, do they claim for us a spontaneous choice or preference of good independently of the Divine a istance. The simple freedom of man’s will, so that, whatever he chooses, he chooses not against his inclination, but through a direct and conscious internal preference of the thing chosen to the thing rejected: this simple freedom of man’s will they deny not. But, while they acknowledge the simple freedom of man’s will, they a ert the quality of its choice or preference to be so perverted by the fall, and to be so distorted by the influence of original sin, that, in order to his choosing the good and rejecting the evil, the grace of God , by Christ , must both make his bad will a good will, and must also still continue to co-operate with him even when that goodne of the will shall have been happily obtained. In the tenth Article of the English Church, it is often not sufficiently observed, that our minutely accurate reformers do not say, that the grace of God , in the work of conversion, gives us free will, as if we were previously subject to a fatal nece ity; but only that the grace of God , by Christ , prevents us that we may have a good will, and co-operates with us when we have that good will. The doctrine, in short, of the English Church, when she declares that fallen man cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God , is not that we really prefer the spiritual life to the animal life, and are at the same time by a fatal nece ity prevented from embracing it; but it is that we prefer the animal life to the spiritual life, and through the badne of our perverse will, shall continue to prefer it, until (as the Article speaks) the grace of God shall prevent us that we may have a good will, or until (as Holy Scripture speaks) the people of the Lord shall be willing in the day of his power.