r age has
tried to do so, but tried in vain. There have been always metaphysical
experts ready to engage to make free-will a something intellectually
conceivable. But they all either leave the question where they found
it, or else they only seem to explain it, by denying covertly the fact
that really wants explaining.

Such is free-will when examined by the natural reason--a thing that
melts away inevitably first to haze, and then to utter nothingness. And
for a time we feel convinced that it really is nothing. Let us, however,
again retire from it to the common distance, and the phantom we thought
exorcised is again back in an instant. There is the sphinx once more,
distinct and clear as ever, holding in its hand the scales of good and
evil, and demanding a curse or a blessing for every human action. We are
once more certain--more certain of this than anything--that we are, as
we always thought we were, free agents, free to choose, and free to
refuse; and that in virtue of this freedom, and in virtue of this alone,
we are responsible for what we do and are.

Let us consider this point well. Let us consider first how free-will is
a moral necessity; next how it is an intellectual impossibility; and
lastly how, though it be impossible, we yet, in defiance of intellect,
continue, as moral beings, to believe in it. Let us but once realise
that we do this, that all mankind universally do this and have done--and
the difficulties offered us by theism will no longer stagger us. We
shall be prepared for them, prepared not to drive them away, but to
endure their presence. If in spite of my reason I can believe that my
will is free, in spite of my reason I can believe that God is good. The
latter belief is not nearly so hard as the former. The greatest
stumbling-block in the moral world lies in the threshold by which to
enter it.

Such then are the moral difficulties, properly so called, that beset
theism; but there are certain others of a vaguer nature, that we must
glance at likewise. It is somewhat hard to know how to classify these;
but it will be correct enough to say that whereas those we have just
dealt with appeal to the moral intellect, the ones we are to deal with
now appeal to the moral imagination. The facts that these depend on, and
which are practically new discoveries for the modern world, are the
insignificance of the earth, when compared with the universe, of which
it is visibly and demonstrably an integral but