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LETTER IX.

ADMITTING that man has such a faculty as free will, solves not a single difficulty attending the cause of evil. The question is still the same in other words-Why has God, whose omniscience foresaw that man would make a use so pernicious to his happiness as he has done of his free will, endowed him with such a faculty? If without free will there could be no sin, then free will has been justly defined the privilege of sinning; and why has man been gifted with this fatal privilege? I will grant, that, without the privilege of sinning, there could not exist the pleasing consciousness of having resisted temptation to sin: but this is a plea

sure that in any period of the world could be enjoyed by such a small portion of the human species, that no argument explanatory of God's purposes concerning mankind can be founded thereon. A few hea

thens with very sublime notions of virtue, and a few Jews and Christians, may have enjoyed and may now enjoy that very exalted pleasure; but the great mass of mankind, who are either engrossed by care to sustain life, or are sunk in debasing idolatry and sensuality, never could enjoy or indeed form any conception of such refined happiness. Dr. King, who accounts for natural evil by supposing it to be inseparable from the nature of things—or, in other words, that God could not prevent it-admits that moral evil is not necessary, or he would be obliged to give up his notion of man's free will. If, then, moral evil is not necessary, how comes unneces

sary

evil to be permitted by Omnipotent Goodness?

This question Dr. King answers by asserting, 1," that the state of man would be worse if he had not the power of free will*;" and, 2," that the benefits of free will could not subsist without the power of sinning t." In support of the first position his grace says, "How much more miserable the state of man would be without liberty than it is with it, will appear to any one who considers what sort of creatures we should be without election: for if man were not free, he would be driven by the violence of matter and motion; and, sooner or later, be quite overwhelmed with those natural evils which necessarily arise from the nature and laws of motion. But it is better to struggle with some of these with

* Essay on the Origin of Evil, p. 345.

+ Ibid, p. 347.

liberty, than with all of them by necessity; the former is the condition of man, the latter of brutes." On this argument I will here make no observation; for to the only part of it which I can comprehend, many of my former observations are directly applicable. His grace indeed, in the latter part of the passage, seems to say that man, by means of free will, suffers fewer natural evils, or less from natural evil, than brutes do who have not this faculty. That man does suffer less from natural evil than brutes do, I much doubt. Granting, however, that they do, and that his grace's inferences from this admission are just-and granting also his second position, that free will could not exist without the power of sinning-still they leave the difficulty they are meant to solve perfectly untouched. Is the actual commission of sin the necessary consequence of the power of sinning?

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If it is, where is the free will of man; and if it is not, why has God permitted the world to be overwhelmed with unnecessary evil? That is the question; and all the cumbrous and elaborate treatises that ever have been written on this subject, without answering that question, have done nothing.

If, however, the excellency of free will consists, as Dr. King says it does, in its enabling us to suffer less from natural evil than we should without it, then divines must admit that this natural evil was not caused by the abuse of free will. But as by far the greater part of the misery of man results from vice, which he could not commit, as divines say, if he had not free willand as, notwithstanding all the exertions against natural evil which free will enables him to make, he suffers much from that too-it follows that free will is on the

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