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and there is no such measurement or our language means nothing.

This view overlooks the office of the moral nature, the transcendent purchase and power that it gives to choice. It confounds simple, intellectual discrimination between enjoyments, or, still worse, a certain automatic adjustment and balance between animal impulses, with choice. Liberty keeps aloof from this lower region. It reposes on extended wing in the upper air of our rational, intuitive powers and emotions. There is, and of necessity must be, a moral character to every true act of choice, since the higher impulses must enter to break up and rule out these estimates of greater and less, these automatic adjustments of influences essentially one.

The sense of guilt which accompanies a moral struggle sustains the view we have presented. If the guilty party could feel that he had yielded to the strongest motive, that a balance had been cast up between motives, and lie had accepted the largest sum proffered, the sense of condemnation and shame would be very different from what it now is. In proportion, however, as the transcendent, unmeasurable character of virtue is present to the mind, are the accompanying moral struggle and the subsequent sense of guilt strong and bitter. The more declared the sin, the more clear the knowledge of the high nature of the things rejected. It is the increase of light and motive, not their decrease, which evokes the forces of moral retribution. The mind is not allowed to console itself with the assertion, that at the time and under the circumstances, it actually chose the strongest pleasure, the highest good. Its infinite folly, its unaccountable guilt are enforced upon it, not its sad mistake, its grave misjudgment.

Lesson 104 - 7. Objected to liberty that it admits no control - p.409

7. Against the notion of liberty, absolute and complete, now presented, it may be urged, that it admits of no