Now we can, it is true, distinguish in the essence or energy of God, between His intelligence and His will--His omniscience and His omnipotence; but they can not be absolutely separated from and opposed to each other, for in Him and in His operations, they, as indeed all else in Him, are one. It would, therefore, be nothing but a foolish and unmeaning subtlety to demand, “Why, then, has the Omniscient created rational beings, of whom He must assuredly have known beforehand that they would fall and perish?” For it is but a logical illusion, when we transfer from the human to the divine mind a form of thought fluctuating between the conceivably possible and the apparently necessary. Man’s freedom undoubtedly consists in the choice between one possibility and another, or in that indefinite possibility which subsists half way between one necessity and another. But God’s freedom is not as man’s: in Him there is neither contingent possibility nor unconditional necessity. All in Him is truly actual, living, and positive. His freedom lies even in the superabundance of His essence--the fact, viz., that He is not bound by any law of necessity to remain contented with this His own internal fullness. For otherwise He were a Fate rather than a free God, and to that conclusion the doctrine of the Stoics consistently enough arrived at last. Extremely difficult must it ever be, in such a system and with such a conception of an intrinsically necessary God, and one bound by this necessity, consistently to account for the creation of the world, which, in appearance, is so irreconcilable with the idea of the self-sufficiency of the divine Being. On this account some of the similarly rationalizing systems of ancient times had recourse to the ingenious device of ascribing the work of creation to a spiritual being of an inferior order, and degrading this secondary deity far below the infinite perfections of the supreme and all-sufficient God. But by this expedient men did but fall, as is, alas! but too commonly the case, from one error into another still greater and even more monstrous. It is, in short, nothing but a mere logical delusion and an illegitimate transference from our limited faculty of thought to the divine intelligence, which gives rise to these pernicious doctrines of an absolute and unconditional predestination, which fundamentally amount and bring us back to a blind and heathenish fatalism.