Page:Essays in Philosophy (1856).djvu/117

 Amid much obscurity and diversity in their account of the nature of free-will, a doctrine of liberty has, with few exceptions, till recent times, been maintained by the most religious and earnest of our British philosophers. Cudworth and Clarke attacked the opposite hypothesis of necessity as a citadel of the Atheists and Materialists of that age, and as interwoven with the speculations of Hobbes and also of Spinoza. In the eighteenth century, the assault on free-will was conducted by the Unitarians Priestley and Belsham, and the system of necessity has since been used by the Socialists and Communists of our own times, as a popular engine for the defence of their doctrines. It is also important to note that the modern doctrine of universal necessity is apparently at variance with what is said concerning free-will, and particularly with the prominence which is given to the fall, in the doctrinal symbols of the Reformation. These creeds assume the possibility of a free-will, when they assert that human freedom was lost, “as to any spiritual good accompanying salvation,” in the fall of Adam. The loss of freedom clearly implies the possibility of it, for