OBJECTIONS.
Two or three objections to the doctrine above established demand a passing notice here.
[AN ACT OF WILL MAY RESULT FROM A VARIETY OF MOTIVES.]
1. It is said that the mind may act under the influence of a great variety of motives at one and the same time. The same intention, therefore, may be the result of different and opposite motives, and as a consequence, combine the elements of good and evil. In reply, I remark, that when the Will is in harmony with the Moral law, it respects the good and rejects the bad, alike in all the motives presented. The opposite is true when it is not in harmony with the law. The same regard or disregard for moral obligation which will induce an individual to reject the evil and choose the good, or to make an opposite choice, in respect to one motive, will induce the same in respect to all other motives present at the same time. A mixed moral act can no more result from a combination of motives, than different and opposite motions can result in the same body at the same time, from forces acting upon it from different directions.
[LOVING WITH GREATER INTENSITY AT ONE TIME THAN ANOTHER.]
2. It is said that we are conscious of loving our friends, and serving God, with greater strength and intensity at one time than at another. Yet our love, in all such instances, is real. Love, therefore, may be real, and yet be greatly defective—that is, it may be real, and embrace elements morally wrong. It is true, that love may exist in different degrees, as far as the action of the Sensibility is concerned. It is not so, however, with love in the form of intention—intention in harmony with moral obligation, the only form of love demanded by the moral law. Such intention, in view of the same degrees of light, and under the same identical influences, cannot possess different degrees of intensity. The Will always yields, when it really does yield at all to moral obligation, with all the intensity it is, for the time being, capable of, or the nature of the case demands.
[MOMENTARY REVOLUTIONS OF CHARACTER.]
3. On this theory, it is said, an individual may become perfectly good and perfectly bad, for any indefinite number of instances, in any definite period of time. This consequence, to say nothing of what is likely to take place in fact, does, as far as possibility is concerned, follow from this theory. But let us contemplate it, for a moment, in the light of an example or two. An individual, from regard to moral obligation, maintains perfect integrity of character, up to a given period of time. Then, under the influence of temptation, he tells a deliberate falsehood. Did his previous integrity so fuse itself into that lie, as to make it partly good and partly bad?—as to make it anything else than a total falsehood? Did the prior goodness of David make his acts of adultery and murder partly good and partly bad? Let the advocate of mixed moral action extract the elements of moral goodness from these acts if he can. He can just as well find these elements here, as in any other acts of disobedience to the Moral law. “The righteousness of the righteous cannot save him” from total sinfulness, any more than from condemnation “in the day of his transgression.”
[CHAPTER XI.]
RELATION OF THE WILL TO THE INTELLIGENCE AND SENSIBILITY, IN ALL ACTS OR STATES, MORALLY RIGHT OR WRONG.