1. Power of Deliberation—The mind is conscious of a power of deliberation. Before the intellect passes the different motives of action, interests, passions, opinions, etc. The intellect considers, compares, estimates, and finally judges them. This is a preparatory work which precedes the act of will.
2. Liberty, Free Agency or Will—When deliberation has taken place—when man has taken full cognizance of the motives which present themselves to him, he takes a resolution, of which he looks upon himself as the author, which arises because he wishes it and which would not arise unless he did wish it—here the fact of agency is shown; it resides in the resolution which man makes after deliberation; it is the resolution which is the proper act of man, which subsists by him alone; a simple fact independent of all the facts which precede it or surround it.
3. Free Will, or Agency Modified—At the same time that man feels himself free, he recognizes the fact that his freedom is not arbitrary, that it is placed under the dominion of a law which will preside over it and influence it. What that law is will depend upon the education of each individual, upon his surroundings, etc. To act in harmony with that law is what man recognizes as his duty; it will be the task of his liberty. He will soon see, however, that he never fully acquits himself of his task, never acts in full harmony with his moral law. Morally capable of conforming himself to his law, he falls short of doing it. He does not accomplish all that he ought, nor all that he can. This fact is evident, one of which all may give witness; and it often happens that the best men, that is, those who have best conformed their will to reason, have often been the most struck with their insufficience.
4. Necessity of External Assistance—This weakness in man leads him to feel the necessity of an external support to operate as a fulcrum for the human will, a power that may be added to its present power and sustain it at need. Man seeks this fulcrum on all sides; he demands it in the encouragement of friends, in the councils of the wise; but as the visible world, the human society, do not always answer to his desires, the soul goes beyond the visible world, above human relations, to seek this fulcrum of which it has need. Hence the religious sentiment develops itself; man addresses himself to God, and invokes his aid through prayer.
5. Man Finds the Help He Seeks—Such is the nature of man that when he sincerely asks this support he obtains it; that is, seeking it is almost sufficient to secure it. Whosoever, feeling his will weak, invokes the encouragement of a friend, the influence of wise councils, the support of public opinion, or who addresses himself to God by prayer, soon feels his will fortified in a certain measure and for a certain time.
6. Influence of the Spiritual World on Liberty—There are spiritual influences at work on man—the empire of the spiritual world upon liberty. There are certain changes, certain moral events which manifest themselves in man without his being able to refer their origin to an act of his will, or being able to recognize the author. Certain facts occur in the interior of the human soul which it does not refer to itself, which it does not recognize as the work of its own will. There are certain days, certain moments in which it finds itself in a different moral state from that which it was last conscious of under the operations of its own will. In other words, the moral man does not wholly create himself; he is conscious that causes, that powers external to himself, act upon and modify him imperceptibly—this fact has been called the grace of God, which helps the will of man.
After giving full weight to all the facts here set forth—and certainly each one enters as a factor into the question of man's freedom—the Book of Mormon doctrine stands true. There is such a quality of man's mind. He is conscious of it. Conscious of the power of deliberation; conscious of the existence of moral obligation pressing upon him; conscious of his own weakness that makes him feel unable to rise to the high level of his full duty; conscious of his need of external assistance; conscious of his will being made stronger by appealing to the counsel of his friends, and appealing to God for help through prayer; conscious of the fact that he is in different states of moral feeling at different times, owing, doubtless, to this appeal that he makes to external aids—yet, in the last analysis of it all, he remains conscious of the fact that what he does, not only can be, but is, a self-determining act, and he remains conscious of the power that he could do otherwise if he would. This consciousness and this freedom are the most stupendous facts in human existence, and upon their reality—upon their truth—depends all the glory of that existence. Arriving here the outlook concerning man's possibilities for the future is immense. Sir Oliver Lodge speaking of man, after arriving at this point in his development, the attainment of consciousness and free will, recently said:
On this planet man is the highest outcome of the process so far (i. e., the process of development), and is, therefore, the highest representation of Deity that here exists. Terribly imperfect as yet, because so recently evolved, he is nevertheless a being which has at length attained to consciousness and free-will, a being unable to be coerced by the whole force of the universe, against his will; a spark of the divine Spirit, therefore, never more to be quenched. Open still to awful horrors, to agonies of remorse, but to floods of joy also, he persists, and his destiny is largely in his own hands; he may proceed up or down, he may advance towards a magnificent ascendency, he may recede towards depths of infamy. He is not coerced: he is guided and influenced, but he is free to choose. The evil and the good are necessary correlatives; freedom to choose the one involves freedom to choose the other.[[46]]
This is the doctrine then of the Book of Mormon: the existence in man as a quality of his mind or spirit freedom and power to will, to determine for himself his course. He may choose good or evil. The freedom of righteousness, or the bondage of sin. If man finds his will strengthened in favor of choosing the good by appealing for help to external aids, to God through prayer, and that help comes in the form of the grace of God, and becomes a factor in helping man into a state of righteousness, it should be remembered that the act of appealing for external help was the exercise of man's free agency. He willed to do good and sought help to carry out his determination; and the assistance of the grace of God so obtained in no way operates to destroy the freedom of man's will. In concluding this subject, it may be said that the Book of Mormon in an authoritative way settles conclusively the great theological question of the free agency of man.
W. H. Mallack, in his work on "The Reconstruction of Religious Belief" (1905), has a most fascinating chapter on human freedom[[47]] in which he illustrates on broad lines the universal though unconscious assumption of the fact of human freedom in both literature and history. Of the characters created by the great poets, he remarks: "They interest us as born to freedom, and not naturally slaves, and they pass before us like kings in a Roman triumph. Once let us suppose these characters to be mere puppets of heredity and circumstance, and they and the works that deal with them lose all intelligible content, and we find ourselves confused and wearied with the fury of an idiot's tale." On the criticism of historical characters he says: "All this praising and blaming is based on the assumption that the person praised or blamed is the originator of his own actions, and not a mere transmitter of forces." And further, all debating on the value of historical characters would be meaningless, "if it were not for the inveterate belief that a man's significance for men resides primarily in what he makes of himself, not in what he has been made by an organism derived from his parents, and the various external stimuli to which it has automatically responded." Our author also points out the truth that forgiveness itself among men (and he might well have extended his argument to the forgiveness God imparts to men also) assumes the fact of human freedom—else what is there to be forgiven! The believer in freedom says to the offending party, "I forgive you for the offense of not having done your best." The assumption is that the offender could have refrained from giving one offense—he had freedom and power to have done otherwise. One not believing in human freedom would say to the offending party: "I neither forgive nor blame you; for, although you have done your worst, your worst was your best also" & having no freedom, he was under no obligation; his action was indifferent, neither good nor bad; there was no blame or praise possible; he is neither a subject for mercy nor justice to act upon.
In the course of the discussion to which attention is called, our author has contributed an idea worthy of all acceptation and is valuable for the reason that it goes outside the beaten paths followed in the free will controversy: "When most people talk of believing in moral freedom, they mean by freedom a power which exhausts itself in acts of choice between a series of alternative courses; but, important though such choice, as a function of freedom is, the root idea of freedom lies deeper still. It consists in the idea, not that a man is, as a personality, the first and the sole cause of his choice between alternative courses, but that he is, in a true, even if in a qualified sense, the first cause of what he does, or feels, or is, whether this involves an act of choice, or consists of an unimpeded impulse. Freedom of choice between alternatives is the consequence of this primary faculty. It is the form in which the faculty is most noticeably manifested; but it is not the primary faculty of personal freedom itself."
I believe this fact in relation to man's freedom; that it is a quality capable of manifesting itself in other modes than choice between alternatives; that it may project an unimpeded line of conduct, and yet in this world its chief manifestations are in a choice between things opposite and we shall see later, according to the Book of Mormon, that conditions in this world are so ordained in the existence of opposites—antinomies—that man may exercise this quality of freedom in the choice of alternatives.
IX.
The Atonement.
After giving an account of the fall of man, substantially as found in Genesis, the Nephite prophet Alma, is represented in the Book of Mormon as teaching his son Corianton the doctrine of the atonement, as follows: