“Please don’t scold him, Mr. Bolling; it’s not his fault, poor little fellow! It was I who asked Mr. Sutherland to take him from the field and place him in the garden, because it is shadier there, and the work is lighter. Everybody cannot be strong and handsome—can they, Fly?” And the gentle speaker turned and laid her hand kindly upon the boy’s head and smiled encouragingly in his face. The child looked up in grateful affection; and the eyes of all the party were raised to welcome the orphan step-daughter of Mrs. Vivian. She was a fair, pale girl, of a gentle, thoughtful, pensive cast of countenance and style of beauty, with which her plain dress of deep mourning perfectly harmonized.
“Come and sit by me, Rosalie, love,” said the widow, making room for the maiden, half embracing her with one arm.
The kind girl put an orange in the boy’s hand, and, smiling, motioned him away; and Fly, no longer mortified, but solaced and cheerful, ran off.
“Now proceed, Mr. Bolling. Rosalie, dove, Mr. Bolling is explaining to us the two great motive powers of the universe; the centripetal, which he says means the law of the Lord, and the centrifugal, which he says means the temptation of the demon. And we, my love, are the planetary bodies, kept from extremes of good and evil by the opposite action of these two forces. Is not this it, Mr. Bolling?”
“No, madam; no! no! no! Lord! Lord! Thus it is to expose one’s theories, especially to Mrs. Vivian there, who would wrest the plainest text of Scripture to her own perdition. No, ma’am; I was about to say that the overruling will of Providence and the free agency of man were the two great motive powers of the moral universe—the human free will, being the great inward and impulsive force, is the centrifugal or flying-off power, and the government of God the centripetal or constraining power; that in the moral world these two great forces modify each other’s action, just as their prototypes do in the material world—keeping all in healthful action. Do you understand me?”
“Do you understand yourself, Mr. Bolling?”
“Ah, I see you don’t—women seldom do!” said Uncle Billy, wiping his forehead. “Thus, then, were man without free will—without the power of working out his own salvation, or the privilege of sending himself to perdition, if he desired it—he would no longer be a moral agent, and, were he never so sinless, he would be at the best only a sinless puppet, an automaton, and God’s creation would be a dumb show. And, on the other hand, were human free will left without restraint of the Lord’s overruling government, why, man would rush into all sorts of extravagances, become a maniac, and convert God’s order into chaos again. But, both these evil extremes being avoided, the Scylla of inert, passive obedience is left upon the right, and the Charybdis of unbridled license on the left, and all goes on well and harmoniously. And now I hope you understand how it is that in ‘binding nature fast in fate,’ God still left free the human will.”
“No, I do not; it seems to me that we are free agents, or we are not free agents—one or the other.”
“We’re both, I assure you—both. Truth generally lies between extremes. I have known that all my life, and acted upon it. We are free agents, and we are not—that is to say, we are free agents within a certain limit, and no further. And observe, my dear Mrs. Vivian, and my dear girls! within that limit we have still room enough to save or to lose our souls!”
This speech was concluded with so much solemnity of manner, that it imposed a silence on the little circle, that might have lasted much longer than it did, had Mr. Bolling been disposed to repose on his laurels. He was not.