If there is any contrariety at all in this case, it is between the _revealed will_ of God in commanding Abraham to offer up his son, and his subsequently _revealed will_ to desist from the sacrifice. It does not present even a seeming inconsistency between his secret will and his command, but between two portions of his revealed will. This seeming inconsistency between the command of God and his countermand, in relation to the same external action, has been fully removed by Leibnitz; and if it had not been, it is just as incumbent on the abettors of Edwards’s scheme to explain it, as it is upon his opponents. If God had commanded Abraham to do a thing, and yet exerted his secret will to make him violate the injunction, this would have been a case in point: but there is no such case to be found in the word of God. It may not be improper, in this connexion, to quote the following judicious admonition of Howe: “Take heed,” says he, “that we do not oppose the secret and revealed will of God to one another, or allow ourselves so much as to imagine an opposition or contrariety between them. And that ground being once firmly laid and stuck to, as it is impossible that there can be a will against a will in God, or that he can be divided from himself, or against himself, or that he should reveal anything to us as his will that is not his will, (it being a thing inconsistent with his nature, and impossible to him to lie,) that being, I say, firmly laid, (as nothing can be firmer or surer than that,) then measure all your conceptions of the secret will of God by his revealed will, about which you may be sure. But never measure your conceptions of his revealed by his secret will; that is, by what you may imagine concerning that. For you can but imagine while it is secret, and so far as it is unrevealed.”(81) “It properly belongs,” says Edwards, “to the supreme absolute Governor of the universe, to order all important events within his dominions by wisdom; but the events in the moral world are of the most important kind, such as the moral actions of intelligent creatures, and the consequences. These events will be ordered by something. They will either be disposed by wisdom, or they will be disposed by chance; that is, they will be disposed by blind and undesigning causes, if that were possible, and could be called a disposal. Is it not better that the good and evil which happen in God’s world should be ordered, regulated, bounded, and determined by the good pleasure of an infinitely wise being, than to leave these things to fall out by chance, and to be determined by those causes which have no understanding and aim?... It is in its own nature fit, that wisdom, and not chance, should order these things.”(82)