it thus removed from all contact with
the scheme of natural necessity, we ask, whether agents can be justly held
accountable for acts thus determined and controlled by the power of God,
or by those invincible causes which his omnipotence marshalleth?

We speak not of external acts; and hence we lay aside the whole scheme of
natural necessity. We speak of the acts of the will; and we ask, if these
be not free from the dominion of moral necessity, from necessitating
causes over which we have no control, can we be accountable for them? Can
we be to praise or to blame for them? Can they be our virtue or our vice?
These questions, we think, we may safely submit to the impartial decision
of every unbiassed mind. And to such minds we shall leave it to determine,
whether the scheme of moral necessity has owed its hold upon the reason of
man to a dark confusion of words and things, or whether its glory has been
obscured by the misconception of its opponents?

In conclusion, we shall simply lay down, in a few brief propositions, what
we trust has now been seen in relation to the nature of virtue and
vice:--1. No necessitated act of the mind can be its virtue or its vice. 2.
In order that any act of the will should partake of a moral nature, it
must be free from the dominion of causes over which it has no control, or
from whose influence it cannot depart. 3. Virtue and vice lie not in the
passive state of the sensibility, nor in any other necessitated states of
the mind, but in acts of the will, and in habits formed by a repetition of
such free voluntary acts. Whatever else may be said in relation to the
nature of virtue and of vice, and to the distinction between them, these
things appear to be clearly true; and if so, then the scheme of moral
necessity is utterly inconsistent with their existence, and saps the very
foundation of all moral distinctions.

Chapter IV.

The Moral World Not Constituted According To The Scheme Of Necessity.

I made him just and right;
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.
Such I created all the ethereal powers
And spirits, both them who stood and them who fail'd;
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell.--MILTON.

We have already witnessed the strange inconsistencies into which the most
learned and ingenious men have fallen, in their attempts to reconcile the
doctrine of necessity with the accountability of m