should be true." Now, here we have a necessary connexion
between the certain and infallible knowledge of a thing, and the
infallible certainty of its existence! What has this to do with the
question about the will? If any man has ever undertaken to assert its
freedom, by denying the necessary connexion between two or more ideas,
propositions, or truths, this argument may be applied to him; we have
nothing to do with it.

Again: "To suppose the future volitions of moral agents," says President
Edwards, "not to be necessary events; or, which is the same thing, events
which are not impossible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to
suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to
suppose God's knowledge to be inconsistent with itself. For to say, that
God certainly, and without all conjecture, knows that a thing will
infallibly be, which at the same time he knows to be so _contingent_ that
it may possibly not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsistent with
itself; or that one thing he knows is utterly inconsistent with another
thing he knows. It is the same thing as to say, he now knows a proposition
to be of certain infallible truth which he knows to be of contingent
uncertain truth." Now all this is true. If we affirm God's foreknowledge
to be certain and at the same time to be uncertain, we contradict
ourselves. But what has this necessary connexion between the elements of
the divine foreknowledge, or between our propositions concerning them, to
do with the necessary connexion among _events_?

The question is not whether all future events will certainly come to pass;
or, in other words, whether all future events are future events; for this
is a truism, which no man in his right mind can possibly deny. But the
question is, whether all future events will be determined by necessitating
causes, or whether they may not be, in part, the free unnecessitated acts
of the human mind. This is the question, and let it not be lost sight of
in a cloud of logomachy. If all future events are necessitated, then all
past events are necessitated. But if we know anything, we know that all
present events are not necessitated, and hence, all future events will not
be necessitated. We deem it always safer to reason thus _from the known to
the unknown_, than to invert the process.

But suppose that foreknowledge proves that all human volitions are under
the influence of causes, in what sense does it leave them