 This latter position did not raise the hackles of the zealots among the Presbyterian clergy in Scotland, but Kames’s position on free will caused a furore and he had to defend himself from attempts to expel him from the Kirk. Kames, accepting the concept of history, natural and human, as the gradual realisation of a divine plan, believed in universal necessity. The laws ordained by God “produce a regular train of causes and effects in the moral as well as material world, bringing about those events which are comprehended in the original plan, and admitting the possibility of none other” (Essays, p. 192). On the other hand, if we are to fulfill our role in the grand scheme we must see ourselves as able to initiate things, that is, to be the free cause of their occurrence. God has therefore, according to Kames, concealed from us the necessity of our acts and he is therefore a deceitful God. Kames sought to explain how this divine deceit enables us to live as morally accountable beings, but this latter part of his philosophy did nothing to placate those in the Kirk for whom the affirmation of a deceitful God was a sacrilege. Kames, however, could not see any difference between the deception by which we believe ourselves to be free when in fact we are necessitated and the deception by which we believe secondary qualities, such as colours and sounds, to be in the external world and able to get along without us, when in fact they depend for their existence upon the exercise of our own sensory powers.