man, consider’d as a sensible being, if it be an imperfection in such a being to be miserable. For willing evil, is chusing to be miserable, and bringing knowingly destruction on ourselves. Men are already sufficiently unhappy by their several volitions; founded on the wrong use of their faculties, and on the mistaken appearances of things. But what miserable beings would they be, if instead of chusing evil under the appearance of good (which is the only case wherein men now chuse evil) they were indifferent to good and evil, and had the power to chuse evil as evil, and did actually chuse evil as evil in virtue of that power? They would in such a state or with such a liberty be like Infants that cannot walk, left to go alone, with liberty to fall: Or like Children, with knives in their hands: Or lastly, like young rope-dancers, left to themselves, on their first essays upon the rope, without anyone to catch them if they fall. And this miserable state following from the supposition of liberty, is so visible to some of the greatest advocates thereof,[1] that they acknowledge, that creat’d beings,[2] when in a state of happiness, cease tohave
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Human Liberty.
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