3. In the last chapter (s. ii., nn. 9, 10, pp. 120, 121), we stated the moral law in these terms, that _God wills to bind His creatures to certain lines of action_, not arbitrary lines, as we saw, but the natural lines of each creature's being. The law thus stated takes in manifestly a wider field than that of moral action. There is in fact no action of created things that is not comprehended under this statement. It comprises the laws of physical nature and the action of physical causes, no less than the moral law and human acts. It is the one primeval law of the universe, antecedent to all actual creation, and co-eternal with God. And yet not necessary as God: for had God not decreed from all eternity to create--and He need not have decreed it--neither would He have passed in His own Divine Mind this second decree, necessarily consequent as it is upon the decree of creation, namely, that every creature should act in the mode of action proper of its kind. This decree, supervening from eternity upon the creative decree, is called the Eternal Law. 4. This law does not govern the acts of God Himself. God ever does what is wise and good, not because He binds Himself by the decree of His own will so to act, but because of His all-perfect nature. His own 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.