decrees have not for Him the force of a precept: that is impossible in
any case: yet He cannot act against them, as His nature allows not of
irresolution, change of mind, and inconsistency.

5. Emanating from the will of God, and resting upon the nature of the
creature, it would seem that the Eternal Law must be irresistible.
"Who resisteth His will?" asks the Apostle. (Rom. ix. 19.) "The
streams of sacred rivers are flowing upwards, and justice and the
universal order is wrenched back." (Euripides, _Medea_, 499.) It is
only the perversion spoken of by the poet, that can anywise supply the
instance asked for by the Apostle. The thing is impossible in the
physical order. The rivers cannot flow upwards, under the conditions
under which rivers usually flow: but justice and purity, truth and
religion may be wrenched back, in violation of nature and of the law
eternal. The one thing that breaks this law is sin. Sin alone is
properly unnatural. The world is full of physical evils, pain, famine,
blindness, disease, decay and death. But herein is nothing against
nature: the several agents act up to their nature, so far as it goes:
it is the defect of nature that makes the evil. But sin is no mere
shortcoming: it is a turning round and going against nature, as though
the July sun should freeze a man, or the summer air suffocate him.
Physical evil comes by the defect of nature, and by permission of the
Eternal Law. But the moral evil of sin is a breach of that law.

6. A great point with modern thinkers is the inviolability of the laws
of physical nature, _e.g_., of gravitation or of electrical induction.
If these laws are represented, as J. S. Mill said they should be, as
_tendencies_ only, they are truly inviolable. The law of gravitation
is equally fulfilled in a falling body, in a body suspended by a
string, and in a body borne up by the ministry of an angel. There is