And so we may be subject to certain other laws, in various departments of our complex experience, without being either restrained or impelled by such external coaction as alone can exempt creatures, constituted as we know and feel ourselves to be, from the righteous retributions of God.
We answer, secondly, that the doctrine of Providence, even when it is combined with that of Predestination, represents all events as "falling out according to the nature of second causes, necessarily, contingently, or freely;" nay, as falling out so "that no violence is offered to the will of the creature, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established." It follows that if there be either on earth or in heaven any free cause, or any moral and responsible agent, his nature is not changed, nor is the character of his agency altered, by that providential government which God exercises over all His creatures and all their actions; he still continues to develop, within certain limits imposed by unalterable laws, his own proper individuality, or his personal character, in its relation to the law and government of God.
We answer, thirdly, that the moral and responsible agency of man cannot be justly held to be incompatible with the Providence and Supremacy of God, unless it can be shown that, in the exercise of the latter, God acts in the way of physical coaction or irresistible constraint, and further, that man is not only controlled and governed in his actions, but compelled to act in opposition to his own will.

But no enlightened advocate either of Providence or Predestination will affirm that there is any "physical necessity," imposed by the Divine will, which constrains men to commit sin, or that God is "the author of sin." "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth He any man.

But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed."[222] We answer, fourthly, that when a "moral necessity" or _moral inability_ is spoken of by divines as making sin certain and inevitable in the case of man, we must carefully distinguish between the _constitution_ and the _state_ of human nature,--its constitution as it was originally created, and its state as it at present exists.

There might be nothing in the original constitution of human nature which could interfere in any way with the freedom of man as an intelligent, moral, and responsible being; and yet, in consequence of the introduction of sin, his state may now be so far changed as to have become a state of moral bondage.

But the constitution of his nature, in virtue of which he was at the first, and must ever continue to be, a moral and accountable being, remains unreversed; from being holy, he has become depraved, but he has not ceased to be a subject of moral government, and the evils that are incident to his present position must be ascribed, not to God's _creative will_, but, in the first instance, to man's voluntary disobedience, and, in the second, to a Divine _judicial sentence_ following thereupon.
And finally, we answer that the theory which ascribes all events, both in the natural and moral worlds, to the blind and inexorable dominion of Destiny or Fate, leaves altogether unexplained many of the most certain and familiar facts of human experience.