to his own inclination and lust, has taken the very first step towards freedom.  For, the Redeemer, the Almighty Deliverer, is near the captive, so soon as the captive feels his bondage and confesses it.  The mighty God walking upon the waves of this sinful, troubled life, stretches out His arm, the very instant any sinking soul cries, “Lord save me.”  And unless that appeal and confession of helplessness is made, He, the Merciful and the Compassionate, will let the soul go down before His own eyes to the unfathomed abyss.  If the sinking Peter had not uttered that cry, the mighty hand of Christ would not have been stretched forth.  All the difficulties disappear, so soon as a man understands the truth of the Divine affirmation:  “O Israel thou hast destroyed thyself,”—­it is a real destruction, and it is thy own work,—­“but in ME is thy help.”

[Footnote 1:  MILTON:  Samson Agonistes, 832-834.—­One key to the solution of the problem, how there can be bondage in the very seat of freedom,—­how man can be responsible for sin, yet helpless in it,—­is to be found in this fact of a reflex action of the will upon itself, or, a reaction of self-action.  Philosophical speculation upon the nature of the human will has not, hitherto, taken this fact sufficiently into account.  The following extracts corroborate the view presented above.  “My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and bound me.  For, of a perverse will comes lust; and a lust yielded to becomes custom; and custom not resisted becomes necessity.  By which links, as it were, joined together as in a chain, a hard bondage held me enthralled.”  AUGUSTINE:  Confessions, VIII. v. 10.  “Every degree of inclination contrary to duty, which is and must be sinful, implies and involves an equal degree of difficulty and inability to obey.  For, indeed, such inclination of the heart to disobey, and the difficulty or inability to obey, are precisely one and the same.  This kind of difficulty or inability, therefore, always is great according to the strength and fixedness of the inclination to disobey; and it becomes total and absolute [inability], when the heart is totally corrupt and wholly opposed to obedience....  No man can act contrary to his present inclination or choice.  But who ever imagined that this rendered his inclination and choice innocent and blameless, however wrong and unreasonable it might be.”  SAMUEL HOPKINS:  Works, I. 233-235.  “Moral inability” is the being “unable to be willing.”  EDWARDS:  Freedom of the Will, Part I, sect. iv.  “Propensities,”—­says a writer very different from those above quoted,—­“that are easily surmounted lead us unresistingly on; we yield to temptations so trivial that we despise their danger.  And so we fall into perilous situations from which we might easily have preserved ourselves, but from which we now find it impossible to extricate ourselves without efforts so superhuman as to terrify us, and we finally fall into the abyss, saying to the Almighty, ’Why hast Thou made me so weak?’ But notwithstanding our vain pretext, He addresses our conscience, saying, ’I have made thee too weak to rise from the pit, because I made thee strong enough not to fall therein.”  ROUSSEAU:  Confessions, Book II.]