The Discipline of War | Page 2

to gauge the mystery, to sound the depth of meaning implied in the simple sentence "I will"?
First of all what is the significance of "I"? You are the only one who can say it of yourself. Any other must speak of you as "he" or "she"; but "I" is your own inalienable possession.
This is the mystery of personality. That accumulation of experience, that consciousness of identity which you possess as absolutely, uniquely your own; which none other can share with you in the remotest degree. "A thing we consider to be unconscious, an animal to be conscious, a person to be self-conscious."
This leads on to a further mystery, alike concerned with so apparently simple a matter that its real complexity escapes us.
"I _will_": I, the self-conscious person, have made up my mind what I am going to do, and, physical obstacles excepted, I will do it.
The freedom of man's will has been the subject of endless dispute from every point of view, theistic, atheistic, Christian and non-Christian.
Merely as a philosophic controversy it has but little bearing upon daily life. The staunchest necessitarian, who argues theoretically that even when he says "I will" he is under the compulsion of external force, yet acts practically in exactly the same fashion as the rest of mankind.
When the freedom of the will is considered in relation to religion, then it bears a totally different aspect. If the will be not free, religion, as a personal matter, falls to the ground, for its very essence is man's voluntary choice of God.
Here too those who deny the freedom of man's will doctrinally yet accept it as a working fact. Calvin, whose theory of Predestination and Irresistible Grace seems to exclude man from any co-operation in his own salvation, yet preached a Gospel not to be distinguished from that of John Wesley!
For us Christians the freedom of the will is absolutely settled by Him Who says, "Whosoever will let him come."
If you are sometimes troubled by certain passages in Scripture which seem to imply that God's predestination overrides man's will, remember, that whenever we are considering any question which concerns both God's nature and man's nature, difficulty must arise, from the very fact that our finite mind can only comprehend, and that but imperfectly, man's side of the transaction. Things which now seem incompatible, such as prayer and law; miracle and, what we are pleased to call, nature; God's foreknowledge and man's free-will in the light of eternity will be seen as only complementary parts of one divine whole.
Remember too that you must take the general bearing of Scripture; not isolated passages in which, for the necessity of the argument, one side is strongly emphasised. The Apostle who, thinking of the boundless power of God's grace, says, "So then it is not of him that willeth nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy" (Rom. ix. 16) is the one who says "He willeth that all men should be saved" (1 Tim. ii. 4).
The love by which the Father gave up His Son; the life and death of that Son; the ministry of God the Holy Ghost; the whole dispensation of the Catholic Church, form one great tender appeal to the free-will of man. Your free-will, my free-will, before which is placed the tremendous responsibility of choosing or rejecting.
And now from the broad thought of will, at its highest point, occupied with eternal choices and spiritual decisions, we turn to will as the governing power in our lives.
It is, to a certain extent, self in action, for before even the slightest movement of any part of the body, there must have gone, automatically and unconsciously, an act of will.
Before every deliberate action there takes place a discussion, which ultimately decides the attitude of the will, that is your final purpose. Put quite simply, the motives determine the will, and are themselves decided by the principles at the back of them.
Let us make this plain by an illustration. It is pouring with rain, you are sitting cosily over the fire with an interesting book. The thought comes into your mind, I ought to go and see my sick friend. Then follows the deliberation: the flesh says, "To-morrow will do just as well." The spirit says, "No, it won't; you may both be dead to-morrow." The flesh says, "Perhaps I shall catch a cold"; the spirit says, "That fear wouldn't keep you from going to a Picture Palace." The flesh says, "Perhaps he won't care to see me to-day"; the spirit replies, "It's a dull, wet afternoon, and he's very likely to be alone."
Now notice that at the back of each set of motives is a vital principle. In the one case the lower self, in the other the higher self, that is to say "I"