A moral agent, to be free, must be possessed of a self-determining principle. Make the will any thing short of this, and you put all the volitions, and of course the whole moral man, under foreign and irresistible influences. 3. Another strong objection to the doctrine we oppose, is, it arrays God's secret decrees against his revealed word. God commands men not to sin, and yet ordains that they shall sin, In his word, he sets before them, in striking relief, motives of fear and of hope, for the express purpose, as he informs us, "that they sin not;" but by his predestination and secret counsel, he irresistibly impels them in an opposite course, for the express purpose, as this doctrine informs us, to secure their transgression. _His_ rule of action is in direct opposition to _our_ rule of duty. And yet he is the author of both! Is God at war with himself, or is he sporting and trifling with his creatures? Or is it not more probable than either, that the premises are false? When or where has God ever taught us, that he has two opposing wills? A character so suspicious, to say the least of it, ought not, without the most unequivocal evidence, to be attributed to the adorable Jehovah. In his word, we are taught, that he is "of _one_ mind"--that his "ways are equal;" and who can doubt it? We are told, it is true, to relieve the difficulty, that this seeming contradiction is one of the mysteries of God's incomprehensible nature. But it is not a _seeming_ contradiction, it is a _real_ one; not an insolvable mystery, but a palpable absurdity. _God prohibits the sinful act--God ordains and procures the sinful act--God wills the salvation of the reprobate, whom he has from all eternity irreversibly ordained to eternal death!_ When I can embrace such opposite propositions by calling them mysteries, I can believe that two and two are more than four, that all the parts are less than the whole, and that a thing may be made to exist and not exist at the same time and explain them by a reference to the mystery of God's incomprehensible nature.