We should find no difficulty, therefore, in believing that the mind of man acts, without being efficiently caused to act. This implies no contradiction; and hence the creative power of God can produce such a being--a being that acts freely, without labouring under any necessity, either natural or moral, in its accountable and moral agency. A being, the end of whose action is found in the sensibility; the intention, the design, and the plan of whose action is formed in the intelligence; and the power by which this intention is executed, and this plan accomplished, is in the will alone. It is in this triunity of the sensibility, the intelligence, and the will, that the glory of man's nature, as a free and accountable being, consists. The relation between them is most intimate,--is inconceivably intimate; but the relation is not the same in nature and kind as that which subsists between an effect and its efficient, or producing cause. The only relation of this kind, which is to be found in the case, is that which subsists between the action of the will, or the volition, and the corresponding change which it produces in the external part of our being. I say, we can very easily believe all this, as it implies no contradiction; and yet not feel ourselves bound, by a regard for consistency, to believe that a world may rise up out of nothing, and come into being of itself, without any cause of its existence. These things are blended together, in the philosophy of the necessitarian, by a most convenient use of an ambiguous phraseology; but they are, indeed, as widely different from each other as mystery is from absurdity,--as light is from darkness.