The constitution of moral beings renders malevolence, or the willing of misery for its own sake, impossible. Therefore disobedience to moral law cannot consist in malevolence. Disobedience to moral law cannot consist in the constitution of soul or body. The law does not command us to have a certain constitution, nor forbid us to have the constitution with which we came into being. It cannot consist in outward actions, independent of the design with which they are put forth, for these, we have seen are controlled by the actions of the will, and, therefore, can have no moral character in themselves.
Moral agents are necessarily active.
That is, they cannot exist as moral agents without choice. They must, by a law of necessity, choose either in accordance with, or in opposition to, the law of God. They are free to choose in either direction, but they are not free to abstain from choice altogether. Choose they must. The possession of free-will, and the perception of opposing objects of choice, either exciting desire, or developing the rational affirmation of obligation to choose, render choice one way or the other inevitable.