'It is clear, that were there no such necessity in the world of matter--did it not in every instance take a precise direction from the laws and the forces which the Deity hath established over it--were there any of its phenomena, whereof no other account could be given, than that they sprung from a random contingency, in virtue of which another set of phenomena might have as readily occurred as the actual ones;--then, at this rate, the world of inanimate things would drift uncontrollably away from the authority of its God; nor would it be any longer his will that overruled the condition and the history of the universe which he formed. {198} Now, it is the very same with the world of mind. ... If this class of events, if the movements of intelligent and animated nature, can be referred to no moving forces directed by and dependent upon him, of whom we have been taught to believe, that he hath ordained the mechanism of the spiritual world, and presides over all the evolutions of it--if amid the diversity of the operations by which we are surrounded, those of the will and of the mind form an exception to the doctrine that it is God who worketh all in all--then, by far the most dignified and interesting of all his creations is wrested from the dominion of him who gave it birth; ... and in the most emphatic sense of the term might it be said, that there is a universe without a Lord--an empire without an Imperial Sovereign to overrule its destinies. 'Both the power and the prescience of God are involved in this question. It seems strange that the Creator of all should not be the governor of all; or that the universe which proceeded from his hands should have been so constituted in any of its departments as to have an independent history of its own, placed beyond the sovereignty and the control of him who gave it birth. But so it would be on the hypothesis of a self-determining power in any of the creatures. ... To avert this conclusion, all must be determinate, and all, both in the mental and material world, be under the absolute control of him who made all, and who upholds all.' [Footnote 65] [Footnote 65: Chalmers, _Institutes of Theology_, vol. ii. pp. 351-355.] {199} According, therefore, to Calvin and Chalmers, the moral world and the material universe are on the same footing, and are governed by laws of the same nature; they have deduced this opinion from their own conception of God, and the knowledge which they believe themselves to possess of his nature, his designs, and his relation to his creatures. God, they say, is an absolute monarch; and in no part of his realm, from no one of his subjects, will he allow of any intervention, any action, or any will opposed to his own law, and because of this inexorable and universal law they deny the free-will of man.