In regard to the first of these supposed incompatibilities, we need only remark that if the Deity, in order to the existence of an equitable moral government, and the consequent possibility of free responsible action by the creature, shall please to subject his omnipotence to conditional limitations, the necessitarian has no business to object.[551] We need feel no solicitude about the Divine sovereignty. God will take care of his own honor and defend his own high and holy prerogatives. Such self-limiting laws prescribed by Divine wisdom and love do not place man beyond Divine control. The necessitarian will not deny that such self-limitation is essential to the very existence of the kingdom of nature. God has established an order in nature, a uniformity of antecedence and sequence, with which Omnipotence shall not interfere. "Such a Divine law of non-usance of power is still more necessary in the kingdom of living agents, and most of all in the realm of responsible agents; it being observable that the more close the Divine self-restraint, and the larger the amount of powers in the agent left untouched, the more the creative system rises in dignity, and the higher God appears as a sovereign. Even in the system of living _necessitated_ agents, as necessitarians must admit, God forbids Himself to disturb the agent's uniform and perpetual acting according to strongest motive." The second of these incompatibilities is really predicated upon our ignorance, and not upon our knowledge. We can not understand _how_ the Divine Intelligence foreknows all future events. To enable us to understand the exact manner in which an Infinite Intelligence contemplates succession in time, it would be necessary that we should be infinite also. The _fact_ that God foreknows all future events is all that is revealed to us; the _manner_ of it He has left in darkness, and we can throw no light upon it by our verbal speculations. Of one thing we may rest assured, that as perception precedes volition in the finite intelligence, so knowledge must precede determination in the Divine Mind. God can not will or act in absolute darkness. Divine predestination must be conditioned on Divine foreknowledge.[552] His foreknowledge does not depend upon his will, or on the adjustment of motives to make us will thus and thus; but He foreknows every thing first conditionally, in the world of possibility, before He creates, or determines any thing to be, in the world of fact. Otherwise, all his purposes would be grounded in ignorance, not in wisdom, and his knowledge would consist in following after his will, to learn what it had blindly determined.[553]