ecome so
again_."(3) And Calvin, in his Institutes, has written a chapter to show
that "man, in his present state, is despoiled of freedom of will, and
subjected to a miserable slavery." He "was endowed with free will," says
Calvin, "by which, if he had chosen, he might have obtained eternal
life."(4) Thus, according to both Luther and Calvin, man was by the fall
despoiled of the freedom of the will.

Though they allow a freedom from co-action, they repudiate the idea of
calling this a freedom of the will. "Lombard at length pronounces," says
Calvin, "that we are not therefore possessed of free-will, because we have
an equal power to do or to think either good or evil, _but only because we
are free from constraint_. And this liberty is not diminished, although we
are corrupt, and slaves of sin, _and capable of doing nothing but sin_.
Then man will be said to possess free-will in this sense, not that he has
an equally free election of good and evil, but because he does evil
voluntarily, _and not by constraint_. That indeed, is true; but what end
could it answer to deck out a thing so diminutive with a title so
superb?"(5) Truly, if Lombard merely meant by the freedom of the will, for
which he contended, a freedom from external restraint, or co-action,
Calvin might well contemptuously exclaim, "Egregious liberty!"(6) It was
reserved for a later period in the history of the Church to deck out this
diminutive thing with the superb title of the freedom of the will, and to
pass it off for the highest and most glorious liberty of which the human
mind can form any conception. Hobbes, it will be hereafter seen, was the
first who, either designedly or undesignedly, palmed off this imposture
upon the world.

It is a remarkable fact, in the history of the human mind, that the most
powerful and imposing arguments used by the early reformers to disprove
the freedom of the will have been as confidently employed by their most
celebrated followers to establish that very freedom on a solid basis. It
is well known, for example, that Edwards, and many other great men, have
employed the doctrine of the foreknowledge of God to prove philosophical
necessity, without which they conclude there can be no rational foundation
for the freedom of the will. Yet, in former times, this very doctrine was
regarded as the most formidable instrument with which to overthrow and
demolish that very freedom. Thus Luther calls the foreknowledge of God a
thunde