Jesus and Free Will

Let us hope that we have learned somewhat, even if no more than negatively, from the route that we have gone over. We should have learned that intelligence, as we realize it, is a gift from some “alien energy,” and that it fails of any originating principle of becoming, or any necessity of being. Neither position nor negation is fertile; something cannot impregnate itself, nor know itself, nor move itself, nor assume any other self-relation; and as for negation or nothingness being actively or processively positive in its results; and as for being, as statically taken, being inevitable because logically posited in the necessity of contrast or opposition—we have seen that the miracle of gratuitous nature furnishes sufficing contrast by its ever-new position in the everlasting yea, and leaves the dead negative, with a mourning wisp of memory to be sure, to bury its dead.

But our most reverent humility and self-denial have still to consist with a sense of our real originality and unavoidable responsibility, which keeps our philosophy at war with religion and policy. There is no philosophical objection to “free will.” There are unquestionable powers or principles, whether rational or blind, and their only philosophical determination halts between monism and pluralism. The miracle of originality is not at all degraded by its quasi appearance in human consciousness, nor is the wonder or the problem of it alleviated by its exaltation to a divine supremacy; on the contrary, such an exaltation disrupts it from psychological fact, only to embarrass its hypothesis with the objections to which we have found the sacred claims of monism to be not quite impeccable.

Time may prove that we have been far and away too “fresh” in our naïve admiration and wonder at autocratic prestige and impossible unity and supremacy, where there is really but a uniform democracy, an everywhere, uncentered, and no better than every here. If we should have the good fortune to touch bottom in the Mystery, and the sacred should become secular, it would be but a nine days’ wonder; we may well doubt that it would greatly affect our religion or our politics, or our worldly ambitions. The obscure and sedentary nature of philosophy is not due to any settled conviction of its hopelessness, at least not so much as to indifference to its problems, whose solution promises no material advantage—nothing that would make a brave man happier, or a coward braver, or a sensualist more spiritual. On the contrary there are high considerations under which it seems better that the Secret should still be kept. The inevitable stales, while Doubt and Hope are sisters. Not for aught that philosophy might promise could Tithonus have been reconciled to an immortality which he could not escape.

We shall find that the problem of moral responsibility, as divided between human and divine authority, was promptly solved by the Master in pragmatical terms. When decision was required of him, as to submission whether to Cæsar or to God, he referred instantly to the emblem of the power prevailing in the immediate field of observation: “Render unto Cæsar of the things which are Cæsar’s, and unto God of the things which are God’s.”

Of all the world’s religious teachers, Jesus was the most explicit and persistent in the denial of man’s originality, and especially of his self-relation. He spoke for the race when he said, “Of myself I can do nothing.” And however he dwelt upon “work” to be done, its performance or its neglect was theologically construed as rather an evidence of divine guidance than as a ground for either reward or punishment by the omnipotent Ruler.

Despite all the talk of free will and personal responsibility, modern culture, especially since Gall and Spurzheim, frankly and even kindly condones the wide difference in human organization and temperament. Certain virtues, each to a certain degree, the customs and needs of society and the dictates of common sense will still insist upon; but “for the most part” a man is now held as little responsible for his courage or his constancy as he is for his mental endowment. Those tough old Romans did in law hold the witness of an action as participant in its results; and in our own courts, not infrequently in cases of assault, a spectator has been adjudged as particeps criminis; the officer is entitled to call upon any bystander for assistance; but in case of default on the part of a weak or timid man the jury is wisely permitted to consider and determine the personal equation: they are assumed to know how it is themselves.

For the philosopher, God is a logical point or postulate, a concerted position, intended to locate or focalize his main problem. For him all questions of responsibility and personality fuse into the logical possibilities of such an assumed position. To popular thought, which at first steadies its vision upon some fancied fetich of a halo and bust, He is mainly defined by negations: He must be, but of course, upon reflection, He cannot be this, and He cannot be that—until finally He cannot be anything; but in any case He must be “infinite”—a portentous adjective, which literally dissipates all conception, eviscerates all content, and means nothing. No man hath seen Him at any time; thou canst not find out Him to perfection; nor is He to any save as the Logos shall reveal Him.

Said Fichte: “I will not attempt that which the imperfection of my finite nature forestalls, and which would be useless to me; how Thou art, I may not know. Thou knowest and willest and workest, omnipresent to finite reason; but as I now and always must conceive of being, Thou art not.”

It is not strange that this bold expression cost him his professorial chair.

Freedom, attributed as a quality or property of anything, should infer the thing’s exemption from any influence or bearing or determination from either its environment or its content. Any creature must, as such, have a natural content, and if active it will be a secondary cause; but so far as it is cause at all it has a given quality, and exemption from this quality would imply the nullification of its being. The hypothesis of anything being free of or undetermined in its own content, or as an actor independent of its creator, or as responsible to its creator in the very instance of its creation as an activity, should require at least a very difficult defense.

The popular notion of “free will” is that one is responsibly free when he can “do as he has a mind to.” The State is not immediately (however ultimately) considering his originality, in declaring his responsibility to its own policy; in a round-about way it does wisely assume the mental cultivation of the citizen; but the immediate congenital quality of the creature, from the viewpoint of its puted Creator, can hardly involve responsibility.

The psychology of this predicament has been rather vaguely exploited. Doubtless there was always recognized (or at least since our “civilization”) something determined in the natural make-up of the individual man. Socrates, for example, argued earnestly that virtue cannot be taught. But it was mainly subsequent to the observations of Gall and Spurzheim that physiological structure, either brute or human, was held to determine, in all but very exceptional cases, the mental and moral qualities of the individual. Ethical and religious objections have of course been raised against the theory, and Emerson even resented it, but intelligent people generally now admit its main contentions so far, that the frontal brain is efficient intellectually, the top and back brain morally, and the side brain more or less æsthetically. This is so taught in the common schools.

Various mechanical bearings and compensations seem to rationalize the consciousness and disposition as naturally resulting from peculiarities of physical organization. In Scripture, the creature thinks “as he is,” and as if necessarily so. The long fibre of the hound must render him sensitive, apprehensive and timid, while the compact bull-dog, with his teeth in advance of his nose, threatening execution before judgment, is sudden and quick in quarrel.

Such considerations should repress the flippancy of this “having a mind to.” Mind is not so cheap a commodity; and the will is not quite amenable to one’s ideals. No doubt, one could have the courage of Ney or Decatur if he had a mind to, in the right sense; or he might go up as climbs the steeple-jack, and standing on the cross, wave his cap to the thrilled and apprehensive crowd below; but the average man in the same position would feel his hair turning gray at the roots; his heart would fail him, and inconsequent and dangerous fancies might come to him.

Even our common honesty is amenable to the clearness of our natural memory and perceptions. Plato suggested the difference of the rogue and the honest man as largely mathematical.

The freedom of will and consciousness requires a delicate appreciation when it involves relations of the divine and the human, and especially, for us here, as implicating the doctrines of Jesus concerning it, for these afford little of favorable countenance to the current notions of free will, especially as affecting human responsibility and retribution. He was the first to so emphasize the divine guidance and government as to invest it in the business and bosom of humanity as a working thought of daily life, for its own sake and hereafter.

There seems to have been but little really scientific reflection upon the intimate relation of our puted originality to the Power that is our ultimate reference, or upon the infrequency of our consideration of it, although for the greater part of the time we are involuntarily using it, and are inspired and guided by it. From the causative viewpoint one hardly need pay any attention to himself, whether thinking or acting. One should be curious, even if not astonished, that, while he is giving attention to the fact, he draws his every breath voluntarily, yet his breathing goes on quite as regularly “of itself”; and also the fact that his thoughts and words come from sources of which he knows nothing, and whose current he can only with special effort control, and whose persistence he would often repress. Give the clever thinker a patent for a device that would stop one’s thinking, he need never again work for wages.

Experts have differed almost diametrically upon the wonderful duplexity of what we call personality, especially as involving divine and human nature. To the egoist, personality is original: “the highest, steepest thought,” said Hegel. Emerson would look no higher than the canon of Kant—the cultured consciousness—and to this our personality is a wavering and inconstant attachment, never quite identical with our more essential being. Indeed he would regard “genius” as subservience of the former to the latter, as “the virtue of a pipe is to be hollow and smooth.” “We aspire and look up,” said he, “and put ourselves in an attitude of attention, but from some alien energy the visions come.” Even so held St. Augustine, Goethe, and many others. The thoughtful man, even with no regard to the consolation of Jesus, must find in this reflection the most intimate solace for his follies and his sins. It is his best and least costly reverence, the belief that he is the instrument of a higher power.

The adjustment of the citizen’s inspired action to the requirements of national and social government was a problem which more than transiently concerned Jesus. He recognized a discrepancy in civil duties being excused by loyalty to divine commands. Though it needs be, in the divine scheme, that offences come, the state criminal shall suffer punishment—shall render unto Cæsar the tribute due to his function and vocation.

The Pharisees demanded of Him a reconciliation of his gospel of mercy with the punishment exacted by the Mosaic law. The case must bear citation:

“Jesus went unto the Mount of Olives. And early in the morning he came again into the temple, and all the people came unto him, and he sat down and taught them.

“And the scribes and pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they set her in the midst they say unto him, ‘Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned; but what sayest thou?’

“This they said tempting him, that they might have, to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote in the dust. So when they continued asking him he lifted up himself and said unto them, ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’ And again he stooped down and wrote in the dust.

“And they who heard it, being convicted in their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last; and Jesus was left alone, with the woman standing in the midst.

“When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, ‘Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?’

“She said, ‘No man, lord.’

“And Jesus said unto her, ‘Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.’”

(How far this seems from the “jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon their children even unto the third and fourth generation!”)

It is theoretically impossible to pervert this episode to an exceptional case. The sin charged, the overt commission, the concurrent testimony, the unquestioned law and the prevalent custom, all confirm it as a recognition of the divine viewpoint, as to the responsibility of the creature to the Creator whose work shall be manifest in him. The pertinence and motive of the legend can obtain only in the divine purpose of the gospel to relieve the human conscience of any responsibility to the inspiring Power whose behest it powerlessly fulfills. There can be no vicarious or compensatory forgiveness of moral dereliction; the secondary originality which burdens the human conscience must be relieved, not by any sacrificial readjustment, but by a wiping out of the record in the act of the divine Disposer as taking the burden and its responsibility upon himself, and setting the “sinner” free. [See Eucken to this same effect.]

Our discussion should have thrown some light upon the recalcitrance of Jesus against Jewish law in this instance. Our theologians, in their “plan of salvation,” seem to still regard him as a sacrifice for the remission of our sins, not considering that only a truth can relieve the spirit. The central truth of the gospel of Jesus is that of himself the creature can do nothing; that God is rather a father than a governor, but more than either he is for his own purpose the inner and inspiring life and light, without which not even a sparrow falls to the ground.

However the creature may seem to himself original and responsible, the true light shows his power to be but secondary from the divine viewpoint, and the remission of his sins is possible only in the truth that the Divine assumes responsibility for them. Let one know that the follies he has committed are circumstantial, and not congenital in his proper stuff—that his shame and remorse are not ultimately attributable to him, but rather to the divine purpose, his conscience may drop the ball and chain; for the truth and the light will have set him free.

That Jesus conceived of himself as historically and generically singular in the fact of this annunciation, its previous repression may well have persuaded him. The personal psychology of the Master is as obscure as was his social environment. The Grecian culture of 400 years before must still have glimmered through the régime of the Cæsars. Pontius Pilate was obviously a philosophical scholar. His chance question, partly to the crude Judean agitators, “What is truth?” is, barring the proem to the gospel according to St. John, the most important metaphysical expression in the New Testament; and the announcement of Jesus, “I am the truth,” is the only plausible retort to that unanswerable question—since really truth is impossible. As to what Jesus knew of the world’s inconsequent philosophy, no exacting occasion appears to have shown. His responses were ever timely and pragmatical, as fitted to his audience. A discussion with Pilate would have been in bad form. A logomachist or a professional sophist might well have regarded this as an eminently fortunate opportunity; but a fine genius, possibly entranced by an auto-suggestion of uniquity, could but stand for and live the only feasible answer to the Roman’s fling.

Our more immediate interest in Jesus lies in the metaphysical weight of his emphasis upon what we regard as the philosophical fact, that personality can bear but a part of the burden of explanation. That the surd should be absolute is an extravagant conjecture. Idealism will have at least this admission, that the Mystery, even as ultimate, must be known to be such: there shall be knowledge or nothing. The problem was still for him, as it must be for all thought, that however humbly he denied himself, however utterly he submerged his originality in him in whom we live and move and have our being—a relation transcendently more intimate than that of father and son, or of principal and agent, or of ruler and subject—he had yet to construe, in his homiletic, a duplexity in his ostensible unity with the Father. The dialectic controversy which the succeeding ages have realized was imminent and unavoidable. But we should observe, as of the utmost philosophical importance, that in his treatment of this occult relation he credited to humanity no more of “free agency” than a personal individuality as such must socially infer. The Cæsar is enthroned in the material world; and life, with all the antagonism and self-seeking by which vitality accrues, is for divine purposes divided among the many; but the private aspiration of the individual, and his prayer to the paternal Power which shall exploit these individual antagonisms, recognizes as little as possible of the separateness between the secular magistrate and the subject of his official jurisdiction. The Lord’s Prayer at once pleads and deprecates the fact that it is addressed to the very source of its own inspiration—to that which both prompts and enables the petitioner “to will and to do.” It voices the helpless anxiety of a supplicant to the Power which alone can furnish the disposition which it demands, yet to which it acknowledges indisputable responsibility. Our interest in the complication is not so much in the sinner’s psychological illusion of freedom as it is in the philosophical testimony against his original competence.

Matthew vi, 9: “Your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him. After this manner therefore pray ye:

“Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

There can be no consistent interpretation of these sentences other than that all power and disposition are of God. How utterly impertinent were the adjuration, “Lead us not into temptation,” in any other understanding than that all guidance and inspiration are of God!—Yet we have it from St. James: “Let no man say, when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted of God’; for God is not tempted of any, neither tempteth he any man.” This protest, however, came from the vulgar consciousness, “under the law,” and lacked the refinement and second-sight of Jesus and St. John. The New Testament will go for nothing if such contradictions shall be allowed to outface its esoteric spirit.

This doctrine of St. James was the voice of that “categorical imperative” for which Kant, in the interest of Prussian orthodoxy, imperiled his philosophical reputation, refusing to consider that all exaltation of the power of the creature implies an equal derogation from that of the Creator—a dividing of the house against itself.

The title of Jesus, whether as the Son of Man or the Son of God, was questioned as exhaustively during his lifetime as it has been since. He read from “the law” an ascription of godship that left it quite other than unique; “to some gave he power to become sons of God”; and our advanced criticism has been quick to quote the precedent, and has so plausibly barricaded the human position, made it so dangerous, æsthetically, to attack it, that its discussion is socially regarded as bad form; we hear, occasionally, that “religion out of church is sacrilege.” In fact the policy of the Church has always deprecated even the possession of the Scriptures in unclerical hands.

Protestant faith, for all its monism, is embarrassed by a too dull appreciation of the unique element in nature. There needs no more than common sense to admit that no one miracle should be more astounding than another, nor than the whole. A man rising from the grave, having a body already, is not half the miracle of a bird perfecting in an egg, with only an impersonal heat to promote its development. That a man was born of a virgin is as nothing to the fact that one was ever born at all. This wonder, like every other accomplishment of nature, is but a question of historical evidence, in which every incident, microscopically criticised, is in some particular unique. The miracle of a local fact fades in its cosmic background. One may readily class himself as a cad and a menial by truculently presuming upon Nature as intending consistency and law. The cataclysms of history, the wandering aerolites which have struck us, the frustrations of promise and the impossibility of final purpose, all give warning that our lesson is not of law, but rather of exceptionality and unreason. On the other hand, the wildest abnormity may recur in its cycle, and prove no miracle as such.

There appears a confusion in ecclesiastic affairs, obviously owing to neglect of the duplex vocation of Jesus as he apprehended and explicitly declared it. While he, as a Jew, loyally accepted the Messianic succession, and announced that jot nor tittle of the law should fail until all should be fulfilled—that is to say that he by vicarious sacrifice should still satisfy the law of retribution as it was written of old—he categorically proclaimed a new dispensation, of love rather than of vengeance, wherein, by the divine resumption of all efficiency, and the renunciation of all originality on the part of the creature, the conviction of sin should be alleviated, and its burden of responsibility borne by the Creator. Our only philosophical interest in the topic is, that Jesus, for himself and for all men, renounced originality and free will, in favor of divine omnipotence.

That Jesus was no philosopher—meaning that his insight was never blurred by dialectic problems—is of course, from our viewpoint, decisively in his favor; but that he was the world’s most profound psychologist, as having the clearest intuition of the demands of honor and conscience, shall unquestionably appear. For who that has felt the horror of remorse for cruelty to another could assuage the pangs of conscience with the thought that another, more generous than himself, was suffering a penalty that was justly his own desert? “Whip me, ye devils!” cried the despairing Moor, as he gazed upon the evidence of his vengeance and superior strength. Could any vicarious suffering have relieved him, who truly “was great of heart”? Not thus is the forgiveness of sin. But if one could have assured him that he had been possessed, that he had been demented and overborne, “ensnared soul and body”—that truly of himself he could have done nothing—he might at length have been free, in the liberty of the Gospel. Not by expense of the blood of bulls and goats is salvation, nor mainly by his own blood itself—“my word shall make you free.” The sin is no longer “imputed” to the creature.

It is not to be denied, however—and herein is one secret of the popular success of Christianity—that the satisfaction of the “law,” the assurance that “Christ has died for you,” that his blood cleanseth from all iniquity, is a postulate more appealing to the average sinner than is the metaphysical assurance of an illusive sense of responsibility. Pragmatic salvation is promoted by vicarious substitution, and is not over-critical as to method, so long as it gets results. The advice is not infrequent among men of approved sagacity and established credit: “Why trouble yourself over these insoluble however important problems? Better keep with the procession, join in the ordinances, take the safe side, and countenance respectability. The yoke is easy, and the burden is light.” It is a natural consequence of this pragmatic objectivity that a thousand worshipers shall kneel to Jesus as the Son of God, where one may bow to the sublime wisdom and goodness of the Son of Man; but an appeal to the Court of Common Pleas would show that one judicious critic should outweigh a whole theatre of others, and that, freed from superstition and professional exploitation, Christianity is the religion of the scholar and the gentleman—neither more nor less for the twentieth century.

Accustomed as we have become to the Immanuel idea—the concept of “God with us,” as meaning the homogeneity of intelligence—we can but faintly realize the weight of its obsession upon the consciousness which first discovered, or at least the personality that first rationally entertained it. Alone among men whose civic necessities emphasized their responsibility to an objective environment, and who had no notion of an inner and subjective connection with the divine intelligence or power, he could hardly avoid the conviction of singularity in his nature and his mission. More portentously, if not even more formidably, his distinction involved the Highest; and we get the hint that his brooding upon it grew into a temptation to thaumaturgically test its significance: Could he convert stones into bread? Could he cast himself from a precipice in safety? Could he go forth into the world and achieve wealth and political power? Whatever confidence the experiment did inspire was held in check by his recognition of an ancient Scripture: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord, thy God.” This quotation obviously was not wholly a retort upon the devil, but also a reminder to himself.

The astute critic will date from this temptation and its lesson, whatever that lesson may have been, the seemingly uncalled for and otherwise unaccountable persistence of Jesus in designating himself as the Son of Man, and in even homiletically defending that title as in itself a sufficient renouncement of that other title, the “Son of God,” whose virtual synonymity he could not trust his enemies to understand.11This consideration is strongly urged in “Christ’s Secret Doctrine,” an essay by H. S. Mories, published by James McKelvie and Sons, Ltd., Greenock, Scotland. Had he deigned to renounce his own singularity and join the rabble as one wholly of their caste, he might possibly have escaped as effectually as did his disciples, of whom not one appeared at his trial. Evidently he had no faith in the ability of his adherents to treat the topic of divine Sonship; and on several occasions he admonished them to “tell no man this thing.”

There appears in the record a special anxiety of Jesus to forestall any accusation of his presumption to the Highest, however difficult his doctrine might render a due discrimination between the titles of Son of Man and Son of God. Obviously in the mind of Jesus there was for him no difference between them, whether or not all men, at their best, might be equally entitled; but the extraordinary significance then first apparent in his claim was a constant embarrassment to his discourse, seeming to demand of him a habitual classification of himself with his fellow-men. I count in the New Testament seventy-two instances of his adoption of the designedly apologetic or deprecative title of the Son of Man, while in but two instances, and these of very questionable literary probability, is he quoted as identifying himself generically and exceptionally with God. On the other hand, he reproached his disciples continually, in that only a lack of faith deferred their accomplishment from equality with his own. It was the profundity of his doctrine, not the over-presumption of his individual supremacy, that cost him his life.

This shall give no offense, our saying that Jesus was not a philosopher. His sense of explanation had attained only to God. The humblest Galilean had as much theology as had he, and could not have learned from him that he had traced the logical mystery to any higher source than the child finds in the father by a faith which forestalls all speculation—the same faith which Fichte came to substitute for impossible knowledge.

And who but he has left in the human record any food for the imagination that could picture the divine man? Who but he, in all history, has divinely posed, or said unto his fellow-man, face to face, Look into my eyes and see all of God that shall be seen at any time?

“Philip saith unto him, Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto thee I speak not of myself; but the Father that inhereth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works’ sake. Verily, verily I say unto you, He that believeth in me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do, because I go unto my Father.”

Surely here spoke the Son of Man, with no undue pretension above his fellow-man, if so be the latter would rise to a right faith in their common nature.

Obviously there should be a reopening of this cause—the charge of blasphemy as against Jesus, accused of posing as “the Son of God”—and a modern reporter should be assigned upon the case. It is true that the testimony was technically inconsistent, but an unbiased judge should perceive in the discrepancy of the evidence a warrant against any collusion or conspiracy of the witnesses, and find rather an assurance of occurrence so extraordinary as to provoke different interpretations, as well as to impart even discordant impressions. Not in all history have complications so intricate, involving property interests so extensive, come to rest in mere possession upon such unsettled premises, and under such conflicting titles. These material properties and perquisites are likely to hold the churches asunder long after the average culture shall have accepted Jesus under his own oft-reiterated title of the Son of Man—par excellence.

It seems long until the race can adjust the personal equation, rather by lifting up its own dignity than by dragging Jesus down.

Finally—and frankly and modernly—we have no immediate vocation to either account for or conciliate the popular prestige of Christianity. For people of mature convictions certain of its manifest discrepancies are swiftly righting of themselves, in ways which a boastful approval would only check and embarrass. It may be safely granted to “modernity” that the personality of Jesus is liable to exaggeration through the mist of distance and the crudity of his record, and that, born into our science and culture, his life and doctrine would have been differently interpreted—and it was false interpretation that destroyed him. But as against all skepticism of the unique in history, and in scientific and secular assurance of the faith in him that is so largely and devoutly cherished, we must hold it as not a syllable too much to say—and we challenge philosophical contention of the saying—that there is no other name given under heaven among men, as of one through whose truth the race can either forgive or be forgiven for its sins, than the name of Jesus of Nazareth.

Said Goethe: “Life, no less than scientific investigation, is confined within impassable barriers. All man’s activity rests upon a given natural order; his work can only succeed when it strikes out in the direction prescribed by nature; it becomes empty and artificial if it tries to sever its connections or to act in opposition to nature. ‘Let man turn whither he will, undertake no matter what; he will ever come back again to that path which nature has mapped out for him.’”

Said Emerson: “The ardors of piety agree at last with the coldest skepticism, that nothing is of us or our works—that all is of God. Nature will not spare us the smallest leaf of laurel. All writing comes by the grace of God, and all doing and having. I would gladly be moral, and keep due metes and bounds, which I dearly love, and allow the most to the will of man; but I have set my heart on honesty in this chapter, and I can see nothing at last, in success or failure, than more or less of vital force supplied by the Eternal.”

Said Spinoza: “There is no bad, to God . . . to him there is no ‘free will.’”

Said St. Augustine: “What is done by thee is done by God working in thee.” . . . “Whatever he does or leaves undone, man can alter nothing; his rôle in life is minutely prescribed for him.”

Said Eucken: “He who will not begin with wonder and admiration will never find entrance to the Holy of Holies. For his discoveries, his syntheses, his happy inspirations, the artist has to thank not his own reflections but a Supreme Power.”

Said Eckhart: “All error and depravity come from God’s creatures presuming to be or do something on their own account.”

If we aspired to an apothegm, it would be that freedom, originality, and reason as in equation with the Mystery, shall be the last hopes of mortal explanation.