The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

truth has been perverted by the abuse of the Reason. But even on the low
ground on which this rationalizing wishes to put this question, it has not
the strength it claims for itself.
The natural Nature of things.
If we consent, for argument's sake, to carry the question out of the
sphere of the supernatural, where it belongs, to the sphere of the natural,
where it does not belong, how little are we prepared to affirm of the
ultimate power of God in the natural world. We indeed speak of the nature
of things, and may say, the thing being so, its nature must be so; but we
may not speak of a nature of things alien to and superior to the will of God.
Even if we grant that there is a nature of things not the result of the will of
God; as, for example, the nature of God himself, and the nature of the finite
as finite, of the created as created, of the made as inferior to the maker; yet
we cannot hold that the absolute nature, or the relative nature, is
contradictory to the absolute will. God is not omnipotent as the result of
His willing to be omnipotent; but neither is omnipotent nature possibly
contradictory to the absolute will. The nature of the created as created, the
nature by which the creature, in virtue of its being a creature, is of
necessity, and not as a result of will, not creator, but creature, is not
contradictory to the will of God. His will perfectly concurs, though it is not
the cause of the nature of things, abstractly considered. But all things
themselves exist by God's will. Without His will, therefore, there would be
no things, and consequently no concrete nature of things. The concrete
nature of things, therefore, is the result of God's will. While, therefore, the
creature cannot be the creator, and, by the essential necessity of the
presupposition, only the creature results from the divine will, and of
necessity has a creaturely and finite nature, yet it is simply and solely
because of the divine will that things exist, and that there is an existent
nature of things. Whatever, therefore, may be the speculative relation into
which the mind puts the abstract nature of things and the divine will, the
actual nature of things and the divine will are in perfect harmony; and the
actual nature would have no being without the will. Actual things and their
actual nature,