Free-will offering

“ Free-will Offerings.—It has ever been characteristic of the Church and people of God, that they take upon themselves the care of the poor, if any such exist among them. To subserve this purpose, as also to foster a spirit of liberality, kindness, and benevolence, voluntary gifts and free-will offerings have been asked of those who profess to be living according to the law of God. ”

“ Until this be shown, we must contend that there is nothing in the universe so diametrically opposed to all free-agency—to all liberty of the will, as the scheme of moral necessity; which so clearly overthrows and, demolishes the very idea of a will and all its volitions.
Indeed, what is called natural necessity does not properly interfere with the liberty of the will at all; it merely restrains the freedom of motion. It is moral necessity that reaches the seat of the mind, and takes away all the freedom thereof; even denying to us the possession of a will itself. ”

“ Sober, earnest, and thoughtful men, it was no Utopia, no New Atlantis, no realization of a splendid dream, which they had at heart, but the establishment of the divine principle of Authority on the common interest and the common consent; the making, by a contribution from the free-will of all, a power which should curb and guide the free-will of each for the general good. ”

“ There is no absolute constraint upon our volitions, and we feel and know that we are not bound, as by a spell, with reference to our actions. It would paralyze all desire of excellence were we to think otherwise. The entire business and conduct of life, with its domestic rules, its social arrangements, and its public institutions, proceed upon the practical conviction that the will is free. ”

“ Such a man is not a worthy object for me to owe a benefit to." When I say that you ought to choose, I except vis major and fear, which destroy all power of choice. If you are free, if it lies with you to decide whether you will or not, then you will turn over in your own mind whether you will take a gift from a man or not; but if your position makes it impossible for you to choose, then be assured that you do not receive a gift, you merely obey orders. No one incurs any obligation by receiving what it was not in his power to refuse ”

“ The true liberty of indifference does not consist, as I have endeavoured to show, in a power to resist the influence of the appetites and passions struggling to produce volition; because there is no such influence in existence. This notion is encumbered with insuperable difficulties; it supposes two powers struggling for the mastery—the desires on the one hand, and the will on the other; and that when the desires are so strong as to prevail, and bear us away in spite of ourselves, we cease to be free agents. ”

“ Free-will is like the proverbial policeman, never there when most wanted. There are two classes of more or less irrelevant persons that cannot be entirely avoided: our blood-relations, and our business-relations—both often so pathetically distinct from our heart-relations and our brain-relations. Well, our business-relations need not trouble us over much. ”

“ Not only our free will, but that sense of right and wrong by which our free will should be governed, and which can always be called up from the lucid depths of the bosom, is an essential support against every trial. Mighty of itself, it leads us, as an unfailing consequence, to rely principally for aid on a still mightier Auxiliary—the eternal and beneficent Dispenser of good and evil. ”

“ If he has no will of his own, why give him a command? This freedom of man's will is a logical necessity. Reason demands it. Now, let us look at this a little. If man is not free to choose between good and evil; between right and wrong; between truth and falsity; wherein lies the reasonableness of instructing him? of exhorting him to do what is right, and to shun what is wrong? of commanding him to do good, with promises of reward for his obedience, and threatenings of judgment and fiery indignation as the sure penalties of his disobedience and sin? ”

“ If it were necessary, it might be shown, by hundreds of extracts from their writings, that the great advocates of free-agency have held, that the emotions, desires, and passions, do really act on the will, and tend to produce volitions. ”

“ For if responsibility must imply choice, and if it can be maintained that no alternatives, in these cases, came before the mind at all, that all reflection, and therefore all choice, was absent—then, on that showing, we should not in these cases be accountable; and hence, as a consequence, the free-will doctrine would come into collision with the vulgar mind, which holds that a man can act freely without exercising choice. ”

“ Let the person come by his choice any how, yet if he is able, and there is nothing in the way to hinder his pursuing and executing his will, the man is perfectly free, according to the primary and common notion of freedom. ”

“ As, for example, should the Will Almighty Permit the Free-will of particular man To break the meshes of else strangling fate— Which Free-will, fearful of foretold abuse, I have myself from my own son fore-closed From ever possible self-extrication; A terrible responsibility, Not to the conscience to be reconciled Unless opposing almost certain evil Against so slight contingency of good. ”

“ In the eye of the law they have rights of appropriation, but in fact they have not the chance of providing means for a free moral life, of developing and giving reality or expression to a good will, an interest in social well-being. ”

“ If any advocate of free-agency had really believed, that the passions, desires, affections, &c., exert no influence over the will, is it not certain that he would have availed himself of this principle? If the principle that no desire, or affection, or passion, is possessed of any power or causal influence, had been adopted by the advocates of free-agency, its bearing in favour of their cause would have been too obvious and too important to have been overlooked. ”

“ But if some of a man's motives are restrained or his actions constrained by the predominance of some other of his motives—as, for instance, when he performs actions which his conscience tells him are wrong—in his Will [Pg 89] not free? The actions are his volitions. If some motives are restrained, and therefore not to be considered free, still the others which have gained the predominance have thereby become his Will; their operation proves their non-restraint or freedom, and the volition or Will is still free. The action is an evidence of freedom. Volition is always free. ”

“ C. When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and conformable to its concept and rendered a totality of necessity,—it is the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and state. ”

“ So far, no complaint can be urged against these provisions: they display only that severe but true humanity, which, in offering fair and liberal maintenance for all who will consent to be honest, insists, not unjustly, that its offer shall be accepted, and that the resources of charity shall not be trifled away. ”

“ True, I had seen much of happiness in similar situations,—for Providence has constructed some one of the human family peculiarly fitted to occupy each niche in the great temple of society,—but how frequently the abuse of the inestimable privilege of free will renders it a curse instead of a blessing. ”

“ Throughout the controversy as to free will that has been carried on among English psychologists this is the way in which the question has been commonly dealt with. The freedom, claimed or denied for the will, has been claimed or denied for it irrespectively of those objects willed, on the nature of which the goodness or badness of the will depends. ”

“ The idea of liberty, as it stands connected with the controversy in question, has reference to the manner in which our volitions come to pass, to the relation which subsists between motives and their corresponding actions. When we say that the will is free, we mean “that it is not necessarily determined by the influence of motives;” we mean to deny the doctrine of moral necessity, or that the relation which subsists between a motive and its corresponding act, is not that which subsists between an efficient cause and its effect. ”

“ Those who unwisely consent to entertain the question whether a man is free to will or has power over determinations of his will, and answer it affirmatively or negatively, consider their answer, whether 'yes' or 'no,' to be equally applicable whatever the nature of the objects willed. If they decide that a man is 'free to will,' they mean that he is so in all cases of willing, whether the object willed be a satisfaction of animal appetite or an act of heroic self-sacrifice ”

“ If your father, who has refused you ten thousand, agrees to give you fifty, and if this woman, who has stood out for fifty thousand, agrees to take forty, if all this happens you will be a free man, but these things have not happened yet, and if they do you will have to prove to me that there will be no more of this talk about the money you have spent on me, and the obligation I am supposed to be under to you, before I will agree to tie myself to you. ”

“ Are we to suppose that the Free Will predicated of man is an universal possession of all? If it is a theoretical question, it must be granted that all men's wills are free. But if it is a practical question as to the strength of the Will as opposed to external forces, and held to be free in proportion to its relative strength of self-assertion, surely Free Will is a variable quality. ”

“ How far, and in what sense, can action which is determined by motives be said to be free? For a long time the advocates of free-will, in their eagerness to preserve moral responsibility, went so far as to deny all motives as influencing moral action. ”

“ If we actually do it, this agreement between the contingent in the use of free will and the imperative demand of reason gives rise to our assent or approbation, which will be greater in proportion as the resistance of the inclinations made this use that we make of our free will more accidental and more doubtful. Every æsthetic judgment, on the contrary, refers the object to the necessity which cannot help willing imperatively, but only desires that there should be an agreement between the accidental and its own interest. ”

“ It is a duty for every will to act thus, directly it is a free will; but the fact that there is a free will that makes this act possible is a favor of nature in regard to this faculty, to which freedom is a necessity. Thus an act of virtue judged by the moral sense—by reason—will give us as its only satisfaction the feeling of approbation, because reason can never find more, and seldom finds as much as it requires. ”

“ But, let a man by his excellencies command the willing services of free men -- of men who can do their own will and pleasure; yet voluntarily obey him, and, if he required it, are prepared to sacrifice their lives, fortunes, and estates, and all for the love they bear him; would not such a man esteem himself honoured, and glorified, in the highest degree by such signal conformity to his will? ”

“ Ah Lord God (said Luther) , why should we any way boast of our free-will, as if it were able to do anything in divine and spiritual matters were they never so small? * * * I confess that mankind hath a free-will, but it is to milk kine, to build houses, &c., and no further: for so long as a man sitteth well and in safety, and sticketh in no want, so long he thinketh he hath a free-will which is able to do something; but, when want and need appeareth, that there is neither to eat nor to drink, neither money nor provision, where is then the free will? ”

“ For if the doctrine of free-will has raised up fanatics and persecutors, who, assuming that men may be good under all conditions if they merely wish to be so, have sought to persuade other men's wills with threats, fines, imprisonments, torture, the spike, the wheel, the axe, the fagot, in order to make them good and save them against their obdurate wills; if the doctrine of Spiritualism, the soul supreme, has done this, the doctrine of Materialistic Determinism has produced shifting, self-excusing, worthless, parasitical characters, who are this now and that at some other time, and anything and nothing upon principle. ”

“ Few men who benefit their fellows have the slightest idea of leaving them free-will; and when free-will rises and asserts itself, philanthropy is very naturally disgusted at such a display of ingratitude. ”

“ But if there be other signes of the Will to transferre a Right, besides Words; then, though the gift be Free, yet may the Right be understood to passe by words of the future: as if a man propound a Prize to him that comes first to the end of a race, The gift is Free ”

“ How could this fear have vied with God's attraction?
O Granter of aid, lend us aid
In this dilemma of the feeble will.
Prayers for right guidance in the use of free will, which gift was refused by heavens and earth, but accepted by man to his own. ”

“ So that He does not give commands in order to take away the power which He has given, but in order that a better gift may be bestowed, as to one worthy of attaining greater things, in return for his having rendered obedience to God, while he had power to withhold it. I say that man was made with free-will, not as if there were already existing some evil, which he had the power of choosing if he wished,...but that the power of obeying and disobeying God is the only cause. ”

“ No, these talents whatever they may be, must be cultivated and improved or increased just as far as they can be; for the manifestation of the giver’s glory,—the possessor’s honor and happiness; and society’s welfare: a triple obligation there is to do so; a triple reward is the consequence of doing so—and a triple penalty is involved in the neglect thereof. But how, plain common sense will ask, can this obligation be discharged without full and absolute liberty? ”