Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

3*6 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMand stretching out to the body as informed by thespirit. And though the conjunction of body withspirit afforded a large matter and occasion for sin bythe body being subject to one class of desires, whilethe spirit was moved by another, yet the seat of therebellion would be in the spirit alone. From italone infringement of the Creator's command inthought, word, or deed could proceed.3. In the Neoplatonic system, as in the Stoic, wefind a perpetual assertion of man's free-will counterworkedand contradicted by the whole theory of theproduction of the world. According to them that productionwas not the result of will but the necessarygoing forth of an absolute power, in which a physicalconcatenation of cause and effect could not suffer theslightest break. Consequently they were compelled toconsider that the actions of man, as part of thismachine, were bound by this necessity. Most pointedis the opposition of the Church's doctrine here, and onboth sides. In the ineffable inner life of God, thatFuthership, Sonship, and Procession of the Spirit, composingthe Holy Trinity, the greatness and majesty ofthe Creator are specially seen in His will to create.And the freedom of the reasonable creature so madeis the mage of the Creator's freedom in making.it The reasonable creature indeed cannot create, thatis, call out of nothing into existence, but it can producechanges in itself, and in something outsideitself, which by God's will is there. And so as thefreedom of the Creator consists in that His will isthe last ground of the being of creatures, the freedomof the creature consists in that the last groundof such changes lies in its will. This is to say thatin the sphere which God has assigned to our freedom