“It has been a very famous question in the schools, whether conservation be a continual creation, i.e., whether that action, whereby God preserves all creatures in their several ranks and orders of being, is not one continued act of His creating power or influence, as it were, giving being to them every moment? Whether creatures, being formed out of nothing, would relapse again into their first estate of nonentity if they were not, as it were, perpetually reproduced by a creating act of God? How there is one plain and easy argument whereby, perhaps, this controversy may be determined, and it may be proposed in this manner. In whatsoever moment God creates a substance, He must create with it all the properties, modes, and accidents which belong to it in that moment; for in the very moment of creation the creature is all passive, and cannot give itself those modes. Now if God every moment create wicked men and devils, and cause them to exist such as they are, by a continued act of creation, must He not, at the same time, create or give being to all their sinful thoughts and inclinations, and even their most criminal and abominable actions? Must He not create devils, together with the rage and pride, the malice, envy, and blasphemy of their thoughts? Must He not create sinful men in the very acts of lying, perjury, stealing, and adultery, rapine, cruelty, and murder? Must He not form one man with malice in his heart? Another with a false oath on the tongue? A third with a sword in his hand, plunging it into his neighbour’s bosom? Would not these formidable consequences follow from the supposition of God’s conserving providence being a continual act of creation? But surely these ideas seem to be shocking absurdities, whereas, if conservation be really a continued creation, the modes must be created together with their substances every moment, since it is not possible that creatures, who every moment are supposed to be nothing but the immediate products of the Divine will, should be capable in every one of those very moments in which they are produced or created to form their own modes in simultaneous co-existence with their subjects. I own there are difficulties on the other side of the question; but the fear of making God the author of sin has bent my opinion this way. We must always inviolably maintain it for the honour of the blessed God, that all spirits, as they come out of His hand, are created pure and innocent; every sinful act proceeds from themselves, by an abuse of their own freedom of will, or by a voluntary compliance with the corrupt appetites and inclinations of flesh and blood. We must find some better way, therefore, to explain God’s providential conservation of things than by representing it as an act of proper and continual creation, lest we impute