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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III SCOTUS AND THE PREDESTINATION CONTEOVEESY ' Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.' Paradife Lost, ii. 557-561. If ever there was any human being placed in a manifestly false position, breathing an element not his own, struggling with tasks at once above and below his powers, it is the eclectic philosopher drawn into the meshes of theological controversy. Accustomed to look for truth on every side, he has become a partisan, with eyes shut to all that does not lie on the path he has chosen. While fully aware of the inadequacy of language to express the highest thoughts, and of the impotency of the human mind to solve the problems which it persists in attempting, he finds himself convicting of error those whose words might be made to bear a meaningin which he would fully concur, and to condemn as wickedness a confusion due to human weakness. Whereas he can only think profitably in an atmosphere of peace and calm, he has descended into the arena full of dust and of shoutings. The disputatious tone he assumes is likely to be more harmful to him than to another, because his clearer vision carries with it an obligation to wider charity. The energy which he should employ in constructive work is expended in efforts which, to him at least, are superfluous. For the most permanent and ever- pressing questions argued by theologians in all ages wear a different aspect to him and to those whose life is not primarily one of thought. Religious mysteries he will reverently acknowledge, but religious puzzles are, for him, meaningless. Such puzzles as disturb the mind of every intelligent child to who...