Had it so pleased God, He could have made beings in human form without any sense of moral right and wrong, and without any power to commit sin; but they would not have been _rational_ beings, would not have been _free_ beings, would not have been _moral_ beings; neither could they, in any high and proper sense, be _happy_ beings, because they could experience no sense of rectitude, no approval of conscience, no delight in moral excellence, no blessedness in duty and sacrifice. God, indeed, has made many such creatures that can not sin. The bee, the ant, the swine, the ape--these can not sin; but they are mere things, not free powers; they have no sense of dignity and moral worth, no approving conscience, no joy of sacrifice, and no immortal hopes. Lived there ever a sane man who would change his lot with one of these, even though in being a man he has the fearful power to sin, and in sinning, the fearful susceptibility to suffer--yea, to suffer eternally? Is there any thing on earth whose value does not fade away when compared with the priceless value of being capable of duty, of virtue, of devotion, and of sacrifice? In the eyes of God, the humblest of moral beings is worth more than all the firmament of stars, and all the teeming myriads of brutal forms of sense that dwell upon the earth. Because God preferred to rule over free powers, and not mere things--free powers that could be governed by truth and reason and love; because He loves moral character, and cares for it more than all the things "that can be piled in the infinitude of space, even though they were diamonds," therefore He bestowed on man this high capacity of character--the capacity to know, to choose, to love, to enjoy, and in a conscious communion with God to be blessed forever. But when God thus determines to create a rational and free being--to make "man in his own image"--He determines to make a being who in acting freely may act in opposition to the mind of God, and in violation of his holy law. In creating a free self-determined being who shall be the cause of his own action, God puts his own omnipotence under conditional limitations, and renders it morally impossible for Him, by mere force, to constrain the will of man. The notion of a free will, which is an efficient cause, being governed by force, is a contradiction. Omnipotence may, if it please, annihilate man, but it can not control man in the sphere of his freedom. "Powers governed by the absolute force or fiat of omnipotence would in that fact be uncreate and cease."[556]