become him as a creature. He had in view a rational good certainly,
but not a rational good for him. Partial reason, like a little
knowledge, is a dangerous thing.

7. As it is not in the power of God to bring it about, that the angles
of a triangle taken together shall amount to anything else than two
right angles, so it is not within the compass of Divine omnipotence to
create a man for whom it shall be a good and proper thing, and
befitting his nature, to blaspheme, to perjure himself, to abandon
himself recklessly to lust, or anger, or any other passion. God need
not have created man at all, but He could not have created him with
other than human exigencies. The reason is, because God can only
create upon the pattern of His own essence, which is imitable, outside
of God, in certain definite lines of possibility. These possibilities,
founded upon the Divine essence and discerned by the Divine
intelligence, are the Archetype Ideas, among which the Divine will has
to choose, when it proceeds to create. The denial of this doctrine in
the Nominalist and Cartesian Schools, and their reference to the
arbitrary will of God of the eternal, immutable, and absolutely
necessary relations of possible things, is the subversion of all
science and philosophy.

8. Still less are moral distinctions between good and evil to be set
down to the law of the State, or the fashion of society. Human
convention can no more constitute moral good than it can physical
good, or mathematical or logical truth. It is only in cases where two
or more courses are tolerable, and one of them needs to be chosen and
adhered to for the sake of social order, that human authority steps in
to elect and prescribe one of those ways of action, and brand the
others as illegitimate, which would otherwise be lawful. This is