Note 53 — THE RELIGIOUS FUTURE OF THE WORLD.

When Mr. Mill says ("Three Essays on Religion," p. 224), "The argument that a miracle may be the fulfilment of a law in the same sense in which the ordinary events of Nature are fulfilments of laws, seems to indicate an imperfect conception of what is meant by a law and what constitutes a miracle," all he really means is that this argument involves a conception of law and of miracle different from his own, which is undoubtedly true. Upon this subject I remark as follows: There is a necessary will (spontaneum non liberum) and a free will(liberum non spontaneum); and these are in God on the scale of infinite perfection, as they are in man finitely. With Mr. Mill, as I have observed in a previous note, Law is taken to signify "invariable, necessary sequence;" and its test is, that given the same circumstances, the same thing will occur. But it is essential to Free Will (whether in God or man) that given the same circumstances, the same thing need not, may not, and perhaps will not, occur. However, an act may be free in causa which hic et nunc must happen; the Free Will having done that by choice which brings as a necessary consequence something else. For there are many things which would involve contradiction and so be impossible, did not certain consequences follow them. This premised, it is clear that the antithesis of Mr. Mill's "Law" is Free Will. Law and antecedent necessity to Mr. Mill are one and the same. But Law in Catholic terminology means the Will of God decreeing freely or not freely, according to the subject-matter; and is not opposed to Free-Will. It guides, it need not coerce or necessitate, though it may. Neither in one sense, is Law synonymous with Reason, for that is according to Reason, simply, which does not involve a contradiction, whether it be done freely or of necessity; and many things are possible, or non-contradictives, that Law does not prescribe. Nor again does Free-Will mean lawless in the sense of irrational; or causeless, in the sense of having no motive: "contra legem," "præter legem" is not "contra rationem," "prater rationem." The Divine Will, then, may be free, yet act according to Law, namely, its own freely-determined Law. And it may act "not according to Law," and yet act according to Reason. In this sense, then, theologians identify the Divine Will with the Divine Reason—I mean, they insist that God's Will is always according to Reason—in this sense, but, as I think, not in any other. For the Divine Will is antecedently free as regards all things which are not God; but the Divine Intellect is not free in the same way. St. Augustine always tends to view things in the concrete, not distinguishing their "rationes formales," or distinguishing them vaguely. And Ratio with him does not mean Reason merely, but living Reason or the Reasoning Being, the Soul. When St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of Lex Æterna he means the Necessary Law of Morality, concerning which God is not free, because in decreeing it, He is but decreeing that there is no Righteousness except by imitation of Him.

The root of all these difficulties and of all the confusion in speech which they have brought forth is this: the mystery of Free-Will in God, the Unchangeable and Eternal, The great truth taught in the words of the Vatican Council, "Deus, liberrimo consilio condidit universa," must ever be borne in mind. Undoubtedly, there are no afterthoughts in God. But neither is there a past in which He decreed once for all what was to be and what was not to be. He is the Eternal Now. But still all events are the fulfilment of His Will, and contribute to the working out of the scheme which He has traced for creation. Feeble is human speech to deal with such high matters, serving, at the best, but dimly to adumbrate ineffable truths. As Goethe somewhere says, "Words are good, but not the best: the best cannot be expressed in words. My point, however, is that there is, on the one hand, a connection of events with events all through creation and an intelligible sequence, while, on the other, the Free-Will of man is a determining force as regards his own spiritual actions, as is the Free-Will of God in respect of the whole creation, and that miracles are neither afterthoughts, nor irregularities, nor contradictions, but at once free and according to law. Miracles are not abnormal, unless Free-Will is a reduction of Kosmos to Chaos, and the negation of Reason altogether."