Mozley: A Treatise on the Augustinian Doctrine of

3 8 Examination of the CHAP. IT.
an effect with which we are familiar in the case of many
remarkable persons. A man who feels in himself the
presence of great faculties which he applies to the attain
ment of some great object, not unnaturally interprets the
very greatness of these faculties as a providential call to
such an application
of them, and a pledge and earnest of a
successful issue. Thus, in proportion to the very strength
and energy of his own will, he regards himself as but a
messenger from, an instrument of, a Higher Power ; he
sees in himself but a derived agency, an impulse from
without. It seems necessary that he should refer those
extraordinary forces, which he feels working within him,
to some source beyond the confines of his own narrow
existence, and connect them with the action of the invisible
Supreme Power in the universe. He is in a sense, in which
and to account
other persons are not, a mystery to himself ;
for so much power in so small and frail a being, he refers
it to the unknown world in which reside the causes of all
the great operations of nature. This is the way in which
he expresses his own sense and consciousness of remarkable
powers ; he would have regarded an ordinary amount of
power as his own, but because he has so much more, he
alienates it, and transfers it to a source beyond himself.
Thus heroes and conquerors in heathen times have some
times even imagined themselves to be emanations from
the Deity. But a common result has been the idea of a
destiny, which they have had to fulfil. And this idea of a
destiny once embraced, as it is the natural effect of the
sense of power, so in its turn adds greatly to it. The per
son as soon as he regards himself as predestined to achieve
some great object, acts with so much greater force and
constancy for the attainment of it ; he is not divided by
doubts, or weakened by scruples or fears ; he believes fully
that he shall succeed, and that belief is the greatest assist
ance to success. The idea of a destiny in a considerable
degree fulfils itself.
The idea of
destiny, then, naturally arising out of a
sense of power, it must be observed that this is true of the
moral and spiritual, as well as of the natural man, and,