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our Free JVill.
very nature, the ability and possibility of
its misuse. And this free-will needs no ! It is due to justification, for without it there might be
some sort of goodness or docility, which may be properly designated as animal goodness, but no virtue in the strict sense of the term, for a virtuous being is one who chooses of its own accord to do what is right, though the heaven falls. And the notion of a moral being, without being endowed with the freedom to act of its own accord, without the concurrence and approval of its own will, is itself a down-right contradiction ; for otherwise, we would be forced to think of morality in stones and trees. To take away this freedom of man is virtually to arrest the system of things to a natural order and means the reduction of human life to animal spontaneity and leaves no room for the possibility of its culmination into an ethical society.
Sin, we thus see, far from being an inevitable outcome of a determining necessity, is the result of the abuse of an orginal endowment of man--which being the ground
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