Against ‘Honest Doubt.’––But when others whom you must needs revere, question and tell you of their ‘honest doubt’?
You know the history of their doubt, and can take it for what it is worth––its origin in the suggestion, which, once admitted, must needs reach a logical conclusion even to the bitter end. ‘Take heed that ye enter not into temptation,’ He said, who needed not that any should tell Him, for He knew what was in men.
Man as Free Agent.
If man is the creature of those habits he forms with care or allows in negligence, if his very thoughts are involuntary and his conclusions inevitable, he ceases to be a free agent. One might as well concede at once that ‘thought is a mode of motion,’ and cease to regard man as a spiritual being capable of self-regulation. Is not this the case?
It is hardly possible to concede too wide a field to biological research, if we keep well to the front the fact that man is a spiritual being whose material organs act in obedience to non-material ideas; that, for example, as the hand writes, so the brain thinks, in obedience to stimulating ideas.