Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

466 THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ANDreason was powerless wholly to subdue, so in thesmaller world of man. In him a portion of thedivine reason was united with matter. If Plato,Aristotle, and the Stoics arranged somewhat differentlythe mode of this composition, yet to allof them alike from the one side and the other thenotion of physical necessity came in. The materialconstituent tended to evil, the reasoning constituentto good: in the man who was made upof the two there was a perpetual jar. There wasno room left in their theory for the concethe soul as a self-originating cause of actisect struggled so hard and so persistently to maintaina doctrine of freewill as the Stoic : but itwent down before that central tenet of their system,physical necessity, the inexorable sequenceof cause and effect, which made up their " commonlaw," by which the world was ruled. The conceptionof an all-wise, all-good, and all-powerfulpersonal Creator, in whose nature the eternalis based, not being clear to their minds, so neitherwas the conception of sin, as the infringement ofthat law. The law of physical necessity took theplace of the eternal moral law: that which mandid he did by virtue of the physical constituentsout of which he was composed. The evil whichhe did was physical rather than moral: and hewas not responsible for what he could not prevent.The questions of freewill, of evil viewed as sin,and of responsibility, are inextricably bound up