This belongs to God, and is the correlative of responsibility (see RESPONSIBILITY). God must be sovereign, or He would not and could not be God. Man must be responsible, or he would not and could not be man, but would be on the level of a beast. These two, however, being opposing truths, either unduly pushed clashes with the other, and neither can both be satisfactorily reconciled by the human intellect, and hence have occasioned endless schools and parties. To earnest, simple souls, however, these truths present no difficulty, but to cavilers they afford a very specious ground for not accepting the gospel against which their hearts are closed, on the score of not being one of the elect, &c. (See ELECTION).