All the apparent difficulty of the question of man's liberty comes from the fact that those who seek to solve it represent man as stationary in the presence of the truth.
Undoubtedly he is not free if we look upon him as a stationary being; if we forget that the life of all humanity is an eternal procession from darkness to light, from the lower conception of truth to a higher one, from truth mingled with error to purer truth.
A man would not be free if he were ignorant of all truth; neither would he be free, nor even have any conception of liberty, if the truth were suddenly revealed to him in its entire purity and without any admixture of error.
But man is not a stationary being. And as he advances in life, every individual discovers an ever increasing proportion of truth, and thus becomes less liable to error.
The relations of man to truth are threefold. Some truths are so familiar to him that they have become the unconscious springs of action; others have only been dimly revealed to him; again others, though still unfamiliar, are revealed to him so plainly that they force themselves upon his attention, and inevitably, in one way or another, he is obliged to consider them. He cannot ignore them, but must either recognize or repudiate them.
And it is in the recognition or in the disregard of these truths that man's free agency is manifested.
A man's freedom does not consist in a faculty of acting independently of his environment and the various influences it brings to bear upon his life, but in his power to become, through recognizing and professing the truth that has been revealed to him, a free and willing laborer at the eternal and infinite work performed by God and his universe; or, in shutting his eyes to truth, to become a slave and be forced against his will into a way in which he is loath to go.
Not only does truth point out the direction a man's life should take, but it opens the only road he can take. Hence, all men will invariably, free or not, follow the road of truth;—some willingly, doing the work they have set themselves to do; others involuntarily, by submitting in spite of themselves to the law of life. It is in the power of choice that a man's freedom lies.
Freedom, in limits so narrow as these, appears to men so insignificant that they fail to perceive it. The believers in causation prefer to overlook it; the believers in unlimited free will, keeping in view their own ideal, disdain a freedom to them so insignificant. Freedom, confined between the limits of entire ignorance of the truth, or of the knowledge of only a part of it, does not seem to them to be freedom, the more so that whether a man is or is not willing to recognize the truth revealed unto him, he will inevitably be forced to obey it in life.