Under a reign of necessity there can be no moral government and no just retribution. It is, at best, a mere physical or natural government; for moral government must be of beings who are free and self-determined, and not of mere machines. To blame a necessitated thing is irrational, to punish it is a cruelty and an injustice. The necessitarian himself is unable to conceal his conscious embarrassment in presence of these difficulties, and to save his theory he becomes reckless in assertions. He affirms that "the whole system of morality--its duties and responsibilities; the whole scheme of moral government, with its rewards and punishments--remains, on his theory, as entire and stable as ever."[521] This affirmation runs athwart all the dictates of common-sense, and collides with the universal conviction of humanity. He is the only consistent necessitarian who rejects the Christian doctrine of sin, denies all accountability and retribution, and reduces the government of God to mere physical impulsion and the management of a universal mechanism. The necessitarian dogma can not be made to quadrate with our primitive convictions; it is out of harmony with all our instinctive beliefs. The innate idea of right, the native sense of duty and accountability, the consciousness of sin, our faith in the justice of God, our religious hopes and fears, all impel us onward to find a rational and valid basis for human responsibility and moral government in the freedom of the will. That man does possess an alternative power of self-determination and choice is evident: 1. _From the direct testimony of consciousness._ We _know_ that any doing of ours might have been reserved--we _feel_, by that same direct consciousness which certifies our existence and our reason, that we have the fullest power of choice. No subtlety, no abstraction of argument, can convince us that we are otherwise than free. "Men are not conscious of compulsion of any kind, not conscious of certain mental states, called choices, which are either wholly or partially independent of their free agency; but they are perfectly and distinctly conscious of entire liberty, and of complete inward power to choose."[522]