Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God’s regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What is _nature_, but the promise of God’s pledged and habitual causality? And what is _spirit_, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God’s agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say’st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I’ll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.” (_b_) It exaggerates God’s power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God’s veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God’s love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God’s will is the only force in the universe, God’s holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin. Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam’s posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards’s theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.