Responsibility, implying freedom in the largest sense, we hold to be the
corner stone of our dignity as men. If man be not free, with the
everlasting crown of freedom within his reach as the prize of all his
toils and struggles, why! there is not a cur that prowls about the
streets whose lot is not more enviable. In that case man would be a
combatant by a profound instinct of his nature, struggling sternly
life-long against innumerable evils, with nothing after all to struggle
for; pressed, crushed, by the weight of intolerable ills, with no hope
to sanctify and no harvest to repay his pain. Who would not "rather be a
dog and bay the moon," than such a creature? For freedom, and the
responsibility which it brings, as the fundamental spiritual fact of our
nature, we contend earnestly, yea vehemently, as for the only
justification of God's constitution of the human world, the only key to
the woes which He lets loose to afflict it and the discords with which
He allows it to be torn. And for the reality of this moral freedom we
shall have to do stern battle with the school who are urging now, with
great subtilty and force, that all the moral phenomena of man's nature
are just the finest efflorescence of the nerve matter of which his
intelligence is manufactured, the cream of the milk of his natural law.

But it cannot be questioned for a moment that men appear to be under
various conditions of advantage, as we might call it, with regard to the
exercise of their freedom and its fruits. The differences arise partly,
but not we believe chiefly, from circumstance. The child of a household
of thieves or vagrants, for instance, seems to have but a poor chance in
life compared with the children who grow up, pure, cultivated, comely,
and pious, in your serene, happy, and orderly homes. But the more
serious source of this inequality is to be found in character and
temperament, inbred lusts, passions, tempers, and proclivities which may
make the life of a man one long agony of struggle and failure, while
another man more fairly endowed may find from the first the way of
wisdom a way of pleasantness and all her paths paths of peace. A man
born with a brutal nature and feeble spiritual energy, or with a native
propensity, as far as we can see, to certain forms of sin--the
temptation to which exercises the kind of fascination over his will
which the serpent's eye is said to exert over the victim bird, but which
another man would burst