And this was enough for his purpose. For he had to
reconcile a Divine system of rewards and punishments with our sense of
justice. And if he could show, as he did, that rewards and punishments
were plainly not inconsistent with that sense of justice in our dealings
with one another, it was impossible to call them inconsistent with that
sense of justice in God's dealings with us.
But the purpose of these Lectures requires something more, and that for
two reasons. For, in the first place, the doctrine of necessity was most
often in Bishop Butler's days derived from a conception of a Divine
foreknowledge arranging everything by supreme Will, not from the
conception of a blind mechanical rule holding all in its unrelaxing
grasp. And though to the cold reason it may make no difference how the
will is bound, yet to the moral sentiment the two kinds of compulsion
differ as life and death. To have no liberty because of being absolutely
in the hands of Almighty God is quite another thing from having no
liberty, as being under the dominion of a dead iron rule. It seems
possible to accept the one and call it an unfathomable mystery; but to
accept the other is to call life a delusion and the moral law a dream.
And in the second place, the doctrine of necessity advanced as a theory
and based on arguments not resting on facts, is a very different
antagonist from the same doctrine advanced as a conclusion of science,
and as deducible from a mass of co-ordinated observations.
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