Wesley Corpus

Would it not blame the artist, who had so ill adjusted the wheels? So that, upon this scheme, all the moral constitution of our nature is overturned; there is an end to all the operations of conscience, about right and wrong; man is no longer a moral agent, nor the subject of praise or blame for what he does.” He strangely answers: “Certainly the pain, the remorse, which is felt by any man who had been guilty of a bad action, springs from the notion, that he has a power over his own actions, that he might have forborne to do it. It is on this account, that he is angry at himself, and confesses himself to be blamable. That uneasiness proceeds on the supposition, that he is free, and might have acted a better part. And one under the dominion of bad passions is condemned upon this ground, that it was in his power to be free from them. Were not this the case, brutes might be the objects of moral blame as well as man. But we do not blame them, because they have not freedom, a power of directing their own actions. We : therefore admit, that the idea of freedom is essential to the moral feeling. On the system of universal necessity, there could be no place for blame or remorse. And we struggle in vain to reconcile to this system the testimony which conscience clearly gives to freedom.” Is this an answer to the objection ? Is it not fairly giving up the whole cause ? He adds: “A feeling of liberty, which I now scruple not to call deceitful, is interwoven with our nature. Man must be so constituted, in order to attain virtue.” To attain virtue / Nay, you have yourself allowed, that, on this supposition, virtue and vice can have no being. You go on : “If he saw himself as he really is,” (Sir, do not you see yourself so?) “if he conceived himself and all his actions necessarily linked into the great chain, which renders the whole order both of the natural and moral world unalterably determined in every article, what would follow ** Why, just nothing at all.