Nothing it seems to me can be more absurd than this distinction. If liberty be essential to responsibility, liberty, as we have clearly shown, can no more lie in the connexion between volition and its effects, than in the connexion between volition and its motives. One is just as necessary as the other. If it be granted to be absurd with the first class of theologians to urge men to do right when they are conceived to be totally unable to do right, it is equally so when they are conceived to have only a natural ability to do right, because this natural ability is of no avail without a corresponding moral ability. If the volition take place, there is indeed nothing to prevent the action; nay, "the very willing is the doing of it;" but then the volition as an effect cannot take place without a cause; and to acknowledge a moral inability, is nothing less than to acknowledge that there is no cause to produce the required volition. The condition of men as represented by the second class of theologians, is not really different from their condition as represented by the first class. The inability under both representations is a total inability. In the utter impossibility of a right volition on these, is the utter impossibility of any good deed. When we have denied liberty, in denying a self-determining power, these definitions in order to make out a _quasi_ liberty and ability, are nothing but ingenious folly and plausible deception. You tell the man, indeed, that he can if he will; and when he replies to you, that on your own principles the required volition is impossible, you refer him to the common notions of mankind. According to these, you say a man is guilty when he forbears to do right, since nothing is wanting to right-doing but a volition,--and guilty when he does wrong, because he wills to do wrong. According to these common notions, too, a man may fairly be persuaded to do right, when nothing is wanting but a will to do right. But do we find this distinction of natural and moral ability in the common notions of men? When nothing is required to the performance of a deed but a volition, do men conceive of any inability whatever? Do they not feel that the volition has a metaphysical possibility as well as that the sequent of the volition has a physical possibility? Have we not at least some reason to suspect that the philosophy of responsibility, and the basis of rebuke and persuasion lying in the common notions of men, are something widely different from the scheme of a necessitated volition? This last class of theologians, equally with the first, derive all the force of their preaching from a philosophy, upon which they are compelled to act, but which they stoutly deny. Let them carry out their philosophy, and for preaching no place remains.