IV. We will now, in the fourth place, raise the inquiry, an inquiry very appropriate in its place, and having an important bearing upon our present investigations, whether the doctrine of the Will, above established, is the doctrine pre-supposed in the Bible? The following considerations will enable us to give a decisive answer to this inquiry. 1. If the doctrine of the Will here maintained is not, and consequently that of Necessity is, the doctrine pre-supposed in the Scriptures, then we have two revelations from God, the external and internal, in palpable contradiction to each other. As the _works_ of God (see Rom. 1: 19, 20) are as real a revelation from him as the Bible, so are the necessary affirmations of our Intelligence. Now, in our inner being, in the depths of our Intelligence, the fact is perpetually revealed and affirmed--a fact which we cannot disbelieve, if we would--that we are not _necessary_ but _free_ agents. Suppose that, in the external revelation, the Scriptures, the fact is revealed and affirmed that we are _not free_ but _necessary_ agents. Has not God himself affirmed in one revelation what he has denied in another? Of what use can the internal revelation be, but to render us necessarily sceptical in respect to the external? Has the Most High given two such revelations as this? 2. In the Scriptures, man is presented as the subject, and, of course, as possessing those powers which render him the proper subject of command and prohibition, of obligation, of merit and demerit, and consequently of reward and punishment. Let us suppose that God has imparted to a being a certain constitution, and then placed him in a condition in which, in consequence of the necessary correlation between his constitution and circumstances, but one series of determinations are possible to him, and that series cannot but result. Can we conceive it proper in the Most High to prohibit that creature from pursuing the course which God himself has rendered it impossible for him not to pursue, and require him, under the heaviest sanctions, to pursue, under these identical circumstances, a different and opposite course--a course which the Creator has rendered it impossible for him to pursue? Is this the philosophy pre-supposed in the Bible? Does the Bible imply a system of mental philosophy which renders the terms, obligation, merit and demerit, void of all conceivable meaning, and which lays no other foundation for moral retributions but injustice and tyranny?