The whole question between Rome and the world, turn it as we will, comes back always to this: Is man God, or the creature of God? He certainly is not God: then he is a creature, and God has created him and owns him, is his Lord and Master. He, then, is not independent of God, for the creative act of God is as necessary to continue him in existence and to enable him to act, to fulfil his destiny, or to attain his end or supreme good, as it was to call him from nothing into existence. God is the principle, medium, and end of our existence. Separation from God, or independence of him, is death; for we live, and move, and have our being in him, not in ourselves. The universe, when once created, does not go ahead on its own hook or of itself without further creative intervention; for the creative act is not completed in relation to the creature, till the creature has fulfilled its destiny or reached its end. God creates me and at each moment of my existence as much and as truly as he did Adam, and the suspension of his creative act for a single instant would be my annihilation. So of the universe. He creates me, indeed, a second cause and a free moral agent; but even in my own acts or causation I depend on him as my first cause, as the cause of me as a second cause, and in my own sphere I can cause or act only by virtue of his active presence and concurrence. When I attempt to act without him, as if I were independent of him, as our first parents did in following the suggestions of Satan, I do not cease to exist physically, but I die morally and spiritually, lose my moral life, fall into abnormal relations with my Creator, and am spiritually dead; for my moral and spiritual life depends on my voluntary obedience to the law of all created life: "Ye shall not eat thereof, or touch it, lest ye die."