Footnotes
[1.] [Note A]. [2.] The theory of Dr. E. Beecher, as it has not been accepted by any denomination, is not referred to here. [3.] Most of the extracts in this and the preceding chapter are furnished by Dr. E. Beecher in his Conflict of Ages. [4.] In scientific language, the object of desire is called the objective motive, and the desire itself is called the subjective motive. [5.] These references are to portions of the volume before mentioned which are not introduced into this work. [6.]
Metaphysicians have mystified this subject thus:—They say “the will” (or choice) invariably, “is as is the greatest apparent good.” But when it is inquired, does “greatest good,” as here used, signify that which the intellect decides to be best far all concerned, and thus right, or does it signify that which causes the strongest desire as measured by our own consciousness? It will be found that, in this metaphysical statement above, it means both. This leads to the same sort of confusion as would result from using the word straight to include the two ideas of both straight and crooked. With such an enlarged, but improper, definition, it could truly be said that men invariably go straight, and as truly that they also invariably go crooked.
The only way in which the expression, “the will is as is the greatest apparent good,” can be true, is to use the term to include both what is the greatest good as judged by the intellect, and also the greatest good as causing the strongest desire, thus making one word express two diverse ideas.
It is this want of discrimination in the use of the term “greatest apparent good,” by President Edwards, which accounts for the fact that one class of the most acute metaphysicians regard him as the defender of free agency, and another class, equally acute, maintain that he teaches the exactly opposite doctrine of fatalism. It is by this deceptive use of the words greatest apparent good, and strongest motive, that such invariableness of antecedence and consequents is made out, as is the proof of producing causes and necessary effects in the material world. Thus results the idea of irrational free agency, making the mind of man like irrational brutes, inevitably and necessarily controlled by the strongest desire, (or strongest motive) and destroying all idea of rational free agency.
In regard to the author of the Conflict of Ages, the writer is still uncertain whether he would or would not assent to the common-sense view of regeneration, here stated, as exact and complete, or whether he supposes that the “habit of sinning, generated in a preëxistent state,” is changed by some direct operation of the Spirit of God on the “nature” or faculties of the human mind, which is antecedent to any right voluntary action on the part of man, and without which, every moral act of every unregenerated mind is “sin, and only sin.”
These personal references are introduced to illustrate more effectively the vague and diversified teachings of theologians and religious teachers in answer to the great question, on which they claim that an eternity of blessedness or misery is depending.