Again: “To suppose the future volitions of moral agents,” says President Edwards, “not to be necessary events; or, which is the same thing, events which are not impossible but that they may not come to pass; and yet to suppose that God certainly foreknows them, and knows all things, is to suppose God’s knowledge to be inconsistent with itself. For to say, that God certainly, and without all conjecture, knows that a thing will infallibly be, which at the same time he knows to be so _contingent_ that it may possibly not be, is to suppose his knowledge inconsistent with itself; or that one thing he knows is utterly inconsistent with another thing he knows. It is the same thing as to say, he now knows a proposition to be of certain infallible truth which he knows to be of contingent uncertain truth.” Now all this is true. If we affirm God’s foreknowledge to be certain and at the same time to be uncertain, we contradict ourselves. But what has this necessary connexion between the elements of the divine foreknowledge, or between our propositions concerning them, to do with the necessary connexion among _events_? The question is not whether all future events will certainly come to pass; or, in other words, whether all future events are future events; for this is a truism, which no man in his right mind can possibly deny. But the question is, whether all future events will be determined by necessitating causes, or whether they may not be, in part, the free unnecessitated acts of the human mind. This is the question, and let it not be lost sight of in a cloud of logomachy. If all future events are necessitated, then all past events are necessitated. But if we know anything, we know that all present events are not necessitated, and hence, all future events will not be necessitated. We deem it always safer to reason thus _from the known to the unknown_, than to invert the process. But suppose that foreknowledge proves that all human volitions are under the influence of causes, in what sense does it leave them free? Does it leave them free to depart from the influence of motives? By no means. It would be a contradiction in terms, according to this argument, to say that they are certainly and infallibly foreknown, and yet that they may possibly not come to pass. Hence, if the argument proves anything, it proves the absolute fatality of all human volitions. It leaves not a fragment nor a shadow of moral liberty on earth. If this argument prove anything to the purpose, then Luther was right in declaring that “the foreknowledge of God is a thunderbolt to dash the doctrine of free-will into atoms;” and Dr. Dick is right in affirming, “that it is as impossible to avoid them” (our volitions) “as it is to pluck the sun out of the firmament.”(158) It either proves all the most absolute necessitarian could desire, or it proves nothing. In our humble opinion it proves the latter.