Wesley Corpus

We accuse and condemn a man for doing what is wrong. We conceive, he had a power of acting otherwise; and the whole train of our feelings suppose him to have been entirely a free agent. “But what does this liberty amount to ? In all cases, our choice is determined by some motive. It must be determined by that motive which appears the best upon the whole. But motives are not under our power or direction. When two motives offer, we have not the power of choosing as we please. We are necessarily determined. “Man is passive in receiving impressions of things; according to which the judgment is necessarily formed. This the will necessarily obeys, and the outward action necessarily follows the will. “Hence it appears, that God decrees all future events. He who gave such a nature to his creatures, and placed them in such circumstances, that a certain train of actions must necessarily follow ; he who did so, and who must have foreseen the consequences, did certainly decree, that those events should fall out, and that men should act just as they do. “The Deity is the First Cause of all things. He formed the plan on which all things were to be governed, and put it in execution by establishing, both in the natural and moral world, certain laws that are fixed and immutable. By virtue of these, all things proceed in a regular train of causes and effects, bringing about the events contained in the original plan, and admitting the possibility of no other. This universe is a vast machine, winded up and set a-going. The several springs and wheels act unerringly one upon another. The hand advances and the clock strikes, precisely as the Artist has determined. In this plan, man, a rational creature, was to fulfil certain ends. He was to appear as an actor, and to act with consciousness and spontaneity. Consequently, it was necessary he should have some idea of liberty, some feeling of things possible and contingent, things depending on himself, that he might be led to exercise that activity for which he was designed. To have seen himself a part of that great machine would have been altogether incongruous to the ends he was to fulfil.