for not going to church."--"Why, father, you told me I might take my choice, and go either to church, or go a-fishing."--"That is true, John; but it was with the implied understanding that, if _you did not choose_ to go to church, I would give you an unmerciful whipping." This is free agency indeed! It is the free agency of orthodoxy illustrated, and applied to practice. Free agency coupled with a penalty is moral slavery and moral tyranny. There is no moral freedom about it. You are simply free to take your choice between two systems of slavery and two systems of punishment or suffering. A hare pursued by a hound enjoys a similar kind of freedom,--the freedom to stand and be caught, or the freedom to run. Of all the absurdities that ever entered the brain of a human being, that of setting God and the Devil both after man, as orthodoxy does, and then call him a free agent, is not excelled. We are told that we can not think a thought of ourselves. All our good thoughts and actions are prompted by a good being; and all our bad thoughts' and actions by a bad being (God and the Devil). Where, then, is our moral freedom or our moral accountability, if neither our thoughts nor our actions are our own, as they can not be if they are prompted by other beings? When a man performs a good act, it is assumed that God is the author of it; and he is told that he must give God praise for it. On the other hand, all wicked actions are assigned to the Devil. He is thus a target between these two cross-fires. Such an assumption sweeps away the last vestige of free agency and moral accountability. Some Christian professors accept the doctrine of free agency to escape the dreaded alternative of assuming man to be a mere machine, which they call fatality. But here you have fatality to repletion. If to place man between two all-powerful beings, and have them both trying to direct his actions at once, don't make him a machine, then we have no use for the word. It is strange that Christian professors have never discovered that, according to the teachings of the Bible, God himself is not a free agent. A free agent is one who can have things as he wills or wishes, so far as he has the power to make them so. Look, then, at the fact that, according to their own Bible, God himself does not enjoy this desirable boon. It is declared by that book that "God wills not the death (destruction) of the sinner, but that all shall be saved." And it is elsewhere declared that "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, that leadeth unto life; and few there be that find it." According to the first text, God desires to save all; but, according to the second, he succeeds in saving but very few. Hence, not having things as he desires or wishes them to be, it is evident he is not a free agent, according to the orthodox or technical sense of that term. Why, then, talk of men being free agents, if a being with infinite power can not be a free agent?