Though they allow a freedom from co-action, they repudiate the idea of calling this a freedom of the will. “Lombard at length pronounces,” says Calvin, “that we are not therefore possessed of free-will, because we have an equal power to do or to think either good or evil, _but only because we are free from constraint_. And this liberty is not diminished, although we are corrupt, and slaves of sin, _and capable of doing nothing but sin_. Then man will be said to possess free-will in this sense, not that he has an equally free election of good and evil, but because he does evil voluntarily, _and not by constraint_. That indeed, is true; but what end could it answer to deck out a thing so diminutive with a title so superb?”(5) Truly, if Lombard merely meant by the freedom of the will, for which he contended, a freedom from external restraint, or co-action, Calvin might well contemptuously exclaim, “Egregious liberty!”(6) It was reserved for a later period in the history of the Church to deck out this diminutive thing with the superb title of the freedom of the will, and to pass it off for the highest and most glorious liberty of which the human mind can form any conception. Hobbes, it will be hereafter seen, was the first who, either designedly or undesignedly, palmed off this imposture upon the world. It is a remarkable fact, in the history of the human mind, that the most powerful and imposing arguments used by the early reformers to disprove the freedom of the will have been as confidently employed by their most celebrated followers to establish that very freedom on a solid basis. It is well known, for example, that Edwards, and many other great men, have employed the doctrine of the foreknowledge of God to prove philosophical necessity, without which they conclude there can be no rational foundation for the freedom of the will. Yet, in former times, this very doctrine was regarded as the most formidable instrument with which to overthrow and demolish that very freedom. Thus Luther calls the foreknowledge of God a thunderbolt to dash the doctrine of free-will into atoms. And who can forbear to agree with Luther so far as to say, that if the foreknowledge of God proves anything in opposition to the freedom of the will, it proves that it is under the most absolute and uncontrollable necessity? It clearly seems, that if it proves anything in favour of necessity, it proves everything for which the most absolute necessitarian can contend. Accordingly, a distinguished Calvinistic divine has said, that if our volitions be foreseen, we can no more avoid them “than we can pluck the sun out of the heavens.”(7)