What we speak of as such, is founded on information from without, and derived from our own judgment in drawing conclusions relative to future events from certain data presented to our understandings. I repeat, therefore, that so far from being accustomed to couple this species of wisdom with the facts which it predicts, there is, generally speaking, not the most remote connection between the prognostic and its fulfilment. Now, as all our ideas respecting the divine attributes, when we depend on reason alone for believing in them, are but an extension of those which we see in each other, we are not instructed by any analogy to _expect_ that the prescience of the Almighty brings about the downfall of a nation as its _necessary consequence_, any more than that Burke’s foresight of the effects which would follow on the spread of infidelity and disloyalty should be instrumental in compassing the overthrow of monarchy in France. Nor _should_ we reason so anomalously, were it not that in considering God as the _creator_ of all those beings whose conduct he foresees, looking in short, upon the divine fore-knowledge as _infallible_, and not subject to the _contingencies_ which accompany even the highest degree of human sagacity, we attach a _characteristic_ to the prescience of the Deity which does not belong to that of man; and therefore while reason and analogy are professedly our guides, we desert their standard, and set up a new light for ourselves which is as remote from revealed as from natural religion, and leaves us inextricably _bogged_ in a morass from which we shall in vain attempt to disentangle ourselves. If the Almighty _made us free_, we can imagine how he may fore-know our actions without controlling them; though he formed all created things, because in the very idea of _freedom_, such independence is _essential_; any compulsion would destroy liberty, and involve a contradiction in terms; but here is the final limit to which human understanding can attain. “_How_ this wonderful union of divine power, and the creature’s free agency is effected, belongs to higher matters than we can reach. We only know, as I said before, that we know _nothing, if we are not free_. The arguments of a necessitarian may seem irrefragable, and convince you that you are impelled to every action; but in the moment that you close his book you _feel_ that you can open or shut it at pleasure, and call up, or dismiss at will, those motives from your mind, which shall be the _proximate_ and immediate causes of your so doing.