very fountains of religious error?

Nothing is more wonderful to my mind, than that Pelagius should have such
followers as Reimarus and Lessing, not to mention hundreds of others, who
deny the _possibility_ of a divine influence, because it seems to them to
conflict with the intellectual and moral nature of man.(137) To assert, as
these philosophers do, that the power of God cannot act upon the human
mind without infringing upon its freedom, betrays, as we venture to
affirm, a profound and astonishing ignorance of the whole doctrine of
free-agency. It proceeds on the amazing supposition that the will is the
only power of the human mind, and that volitions are the only phenomena
ever manifested therein; so that God cannot act upon it at all, unless it
be to produce volitions. But is it true, that God must do all things
within us, or he can do nothing? that if he produce a change in our mental
state, then he must produce all conceivable changes therein? In order to
refute so rash a conclusion, and explode the wild supposition on which it
is based, it will be necessary to recur to the threefold distinction of
the intelligence, the sensibility, and the will, already referred to.

In the perception of truth, as we have seen, the intelligence is perfectly
passive. Every state of the intelligence is as completely necessitated as
is the affirmation that two and two are equal to four. The decisions of
the intelligence, then, are not free acts; indeed, they are not acts at
all, in the proper sense of the word. They are passive states of the
intellect. They are usually called acts, it is true; and this use of
language is, no doubt, one of the causes which has given rise to so many
errors and delusions in regard to moral and accountable agency. With every
decision or state of the intelligence, with every perception of truth by
it, there is intimately associated, it is true, an act of the mind, a
state of the will, a volition, by which the attention is directed to the
subject under consideration; and it is this intimate association in which
the two states or mental phenomena seem blended into one, which has led so
many to regard the passive susceptibility, called the intelligence, as an
active power, and its states as free acts of the mind. A more correct
analysis, a finer discrimination of the real facts of consciousness, must
prevail on this subject, before light can be let in upon the philosophy of
free and accountable agency. Th