Such is the candid confession of
this devoted Calvinist.

We have now seen the nature of that freedom of the will which the immortal
Edwards has exerted all his powers to recommend to the Christian world!
"Egregious liberty!" exclaimed Calvin. "It merely allows us elbow-room,"
says Leibnitz. "It seems, after all, to leave us mere machines," says
Dick. "It is trifling to speak of such a thing," says the younger Edwards,
in relation to the will. "Why, surely, this cannot be what the great
President Edwards meant by the freedom of the will," says Dr. Day. He
certainly must have evaded his own idea on that point. Is it not evident,
that the house of the necessitarian is divided against itself?

Necessitarians not only refute each other, but in most cases each one
contradicts himself. Thus the younger Edwards says, it is absurd to speak
of a power to act according to our choice, when the question relates, not
to the freedom of the body, but to the freedom of the mind itself. He
happens to see the absurdity of this mode of speaking when he finds it in
his adversary, Dr. West; and yet it is precisely his own definition of
freedom. "But if by liberty," says he, "be meant a power of willing and
choosing, an exemption from co-action and natural necessity, and power,
opportunity, and advantage, to _execute our own choice_; in this sense we
hold liberty."(32) Thus he returns to the absurd idea of free-will as
consisting in "elbow-room," which merely allows our choice or volition to
pass into effect. Dr. Dick is guilty of the same inconsistency. Though he
admits, as we have seen, that this definition of liberty does not get rid
of every difficulty, but seems to leave us mere "machines;" yet he has
recourse to it, in order to reconcile the Calvinistic view of divine grace
with the free-agency of man. "The great objection," says he, "against the
invincibility of divine grace, is, that it is subversive of the liberty of
the will."(33) But, he replies, "True liberty consists in doing what we do
with knowledge and _from choice_."

Yet as if unconscious that their greatest champions were thus routed and
overthrown by each other, we see hundreds of minor necessitarians still
fighting on with the same weapons, perfectly unmindful of the disorder and
confusion which reigns around them in their own ranks. Thus, for example,
D'Aubigne says, "It were _easy to demonstrate_ that the doctrine of the
reformers did not take away from man the liber