Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/60

individualized, with a definite and peculiar nature; and whether it act, or think, or merely exist, it must act, or think, or exist in this nature. However free to act this nature, it is not free to forsake it; and whether or not motives in the outer world may bias its volition or its direction, it must find in itself if not elsewhere the reason of its peculiar course. Not God himself can be supposed to transcend his nature; nor can any being that he has created: only the forced positions of an erroneous system ever could have driven men to the invention of a free will—free of the world, free of its creator, and free of its own construction, without bounds or definition.

The consciousness of freedom from God, (of which we shall see a beautiful utility hereafter,) is properly a consciousness of the original or unself-contemplative man who has not discovered the meaning of divinity, and is refuted by reason in the advancement of humanity—reason based upon experience. We find that men have each a peculiar nature, which no single volition can alter, whatever time and custom may accomplish. Our friend is usually "the same old sixpence," though years have passed. Perhaps his sentiments have changed; but the character or basis of the man supports the new sentiments with much the same force as it did the old. That which the polemics call moral inability is as determined as any inability physical. Motives cannot be resisted,—which means but this—the mind and not the motive is the actor, and the mind can act only according to its nature. A man may walk a plank that lies on the earth, with coolness and with ease: but lift that