shall concur unto. A servant or a subject may be indifferent what
command he receives: he may will simply to obey,--to go here or there,
as he is bid, or to be left without orders where he is. That is
because he leaves the entire direction and management of the household
to his master. But for God to be thus indifferent what action He
should lend His concurrence to, would be to forego all design and
purpose of His own as to the use and destiny of the creatures which He
has made and continually preserves. This God cannot do, for He cannot
act aimlessly. It would be renouncing the direction of His own work,
and making the creature His superior. God is incapable of such
renunciation and subservience. He must, then, will the cooperation
which He lends, and the concurrent action of the creature, to take a
certain course, regulated and prescribed by Himself: which is our
proposition, that God cannot but will to bind His creatures to certain
lines of action. If His free creatures choose to stray from these
lines, God indeed still cooperates, and to His cooperation is to be
ascribed the _physical goodness_ of the action, not its _moral
inordinateness and inopportuneness_. Still, as the action is morally
inordinate, God may be said to cooperate, in a manner, where He would
not: whence we gather some conception of the enormity of sin. (See c.
vii., nn. 5, 6, pp. 130, 131.)

11. The lines of action laid down and prescribed by God are not
arbitrary and irrespective of the subject of the command. They are
determined in each case by the nature of the subject. The Author of
Nature is not apt to subvert that order which proceeds from Himself.
He bids every creature act up to that nature wherein He has created
it. His commands follow the line of natural exigency. What this
natural exigency amounts to in man in regard to his human acts, we
have already seen, (c. vi., s. i., p. 109.)