sequitur esse_, axioms as clear as
daylight. Let us go further. If creatures co-operated with God (here is
meant an active cooperation, and not co-operation by a passive instrument)
to conserve themselves they would act before being: that has been
demonstrated. Now if they co-operated with God for the production of any
other thing, they would also act before being; it is therefore as
impossible for them to co-operate with God for the production of any other
thing (such as local movement, an affirmation, volition, entities actually
distinct from their substance, so it is asserted) as for their own
conservation. Since their conservation is a continued creation, and since
all human creatures in the world must confess that they cannot co-operate
with God at the first moment of their existence, either to produce
themselves or to give themselves any modality, since that would be to act
before being (observe that Thomas Aquinas and sundry other Schoolmen teach
that if the angels had sinned at the first moment of their creation God
would be the author of the sin: see the Feuillant Pierre de St. Joseph, p.
318, _et seqq_., of the _Suavis Concordia Humanae Libertatis_; it is a sign
that they acknowledge that at the first instant the creature cannot act in
anything whatsoever), it follows manifestly that they cannot co-operate
with God in any one of the subsequent moments, either to produce themselves
or to produce any other thing. If they could co-operate therein at the
second moment of their existence, nothing would prevent their being able to
cooperate at the first moment.'

388. This is the way it will be necessary to answer these arguments. Let us
assume that the creature is produced anew at each instant; let us grant
also that the instant excludes all priority of time, being indivisible; but
let us point out that it does not exclude priority of nature, or what is
called anteriority _in signo rationis,_ and that this is sufficient. The
production, or action whereby God produces, is anterior by nature to the
existence of the creature that is produced; the creature taken in itself,
with its nature and its necessary properties, is anterior to its accidental
affections and to its actions; and yet all these things are in being [358]
in the same moment. God produces the creature in conformity with the
exigency of the preceding instants, according to the laws of his wisdom;
and the creature operates in conformity with that nature wh