the indulgence of the passions which prompt
those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin,
or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a
truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not
arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as
offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind,
acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on
this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral
perceptions have thus been quickened, we shall not always "rule our
province of the brute" with a strong hand--true also that, owing to our
earthly nature, "in many things we all stumble;" but so far from viewing
these failures complacently, they ought to spur us to more earnest
endeavours to leave our lower inheritance behind. The truth {164}
concerning the "inevitableness" of sin was stated by our Lord when He
said, "It must needs be that occasions"--_viz._, of stumbling--"come; but
woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh." Sin as such, as an
"occasion," is inevitable; but for any particular sin, for acting
contrarily to the known best, the individual is responsible--and greatest
of all is the responsibility of one who knowingly and of design becomes
an "occasion of stumbling" to another, making sin more difficult to
avoid, or positively inciting another to wrong-doing. We do not forget
the inequalities of moral endowment, nor do we leave out of sight that a
temptation which for one man scarcely so much as exists may prove
well-nigh irresistible to another; but the judgment upon each is in the
wise and Fatherly hands of Him who knoweth our frame, and remembereth
that we are dust.

We have seen that Determinism, in spite of its humanitarian and even
optimistic pretensions, when it is consistently applied falsifies every
one of its promises; it is worth while to ask ourselves yet once more
what is likely to be the effect of this doctrine upon the characters of
those who seriously entertain it. Mill, in his frigid and precise, yet
scrupulously just manner, expressed the opinion that

The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the
truth which the word necessity puts {165} out of sight, namely the power
of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has
given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than
has ge