y of a criticism of its opponents, to
one side or aspect of an eternal controversy, eternally suspended, as
representing two opposite aspects of experience [70] itself. Calvin
and Arminius, Jansen and Molina sum up, in fact, respectively, like the
respective adherents of the freedom or of the necessity of the human
will, in the more general question of moral philosophy, two opposed,
two counter trains of phenomena actually observable by us in human
action, too large and complex a matter, as it is, to be embodied or
summed up in any one single proposition or idea.

There are moments of one's own life, aspects of the life of others, of
which the conclusion that the will is free seems to be the only--is the
natural or reasonable--account. Yet those very moments on reflexion,
on second thoughts, present themselves again, as but links in a chain,
in an all-embracing network of chains. In all education we assume, in
some inexplicable combination, at once the freedom and the necessity of
the subject of it. And who on a survey of life from outside would
willingly lose the dramatic contrasts, the alternating interests, for
which the opposed ideas of freedom and necessity are our respective
points of view? How significant become the details we might otherwise
pass by almost unobserved, but to which we are put on the alert by the
abstract query whether a man be indeed a freeman or a slave, as we
watch from aside his devious course, his struggles, his final tragedy
or triumph. So much value at least there may be in problems insoluble
in themselves, such as that great controversy of Pascal's day [71]
between Jesuit and Jansenist. And here again who would forego, in the
spectacle of the religious history of the human soul, the aspects, the
details which the doctrines of universal and particular grace
respectively embody? The Jesuit doctrine of sufficient grace is
certainly, to use the familiar expression, a very pleasant doctrine
conducive to the due feeding of the whole flock of Christ, as being, as
assuming them to be, what they really are, at the worst, God's silly
sheep. It has something in it congruous with the rising of the
physical sun on the evil and on the good, while the wheat and the tares
grow naturally, peacefully together. But how pleasant also the
opposite doctrine, how true, how truly descriptive of certain
distinguished, magnifical, or elect souls, vessels of election, epris
des hauteurs, as we see them pas