"You are acquainted," he replied, "with the Scripture doctrine of Predestination, and, in thinking over it, in connection with the destinies of man, it must have struck you that, however much it may interfere with our fixed notions of the goodness of Deity, it is thoroughly in accordance with the actual condition of our race. As far as we can know of ourselves and the things around us, there seems, through the will of Deity--for to what else can we refer it?--a fixed, invariable connection between what we term cause and effect. Nor do we demand of any class of mere effects, in the inanimate or irrational world, that they should regulate themselves otherwise than the causes which produce them have determined. The roe and the tiger pursue, unquestioned, the instincts of their several natures; the cork rises, and the stone sinks; and no one thinks of calling either to account for movements so opposite. But it is not so with the family of man; and yet our minds, our bodies, our circumstances, are but combinations of effects, over the causes of which we have no control. We did not choose a country for ourselves, nor yet a condition in life--nor did we determine our modicum of intellect, or our amount of passion--we did not impart its gravity to the weightier part of our nature, or give expansion to the lighter--nor are our instincts of our own planting. How, then, being thus as much the creatures of necessity as the denizens of the wild and forest--as thoroughly under the agency of fixed, unalterable causes, as the dead matter around us--why are we yet the subjects of a retributive system, and accountable for all our actions?" "You quarrel with Calvinism," I said; "and seem one of the most thorough-going necessitarians I ever knew." "Not so," he replied; "though my judgment cannot disprove these conclusions, my heart cannot acquiesce in them--though I see that I am as certainly the subject of laws that exist and operate independent of my will, as the dead matter around me, I feel, with a certainty quite as great, that I am a free, accountable creature. It is according to the scope of my entire reason that I should deem myself bound--it is according to the constitution of my whole nature that I should feel myself free. And in this consists the great, the fearful problem--a problem which both reason and revelation propound; but the truths which can alone solve it, seem to lie beyond the horizon of darkness--and we vex ourselves in vain. 'Tis a sort of moral asymptotes; but its lines, instead of approaching through all space without meeting, seem receding through all space, and yet meet."