When Henry Ford said, "The customer can have a car in any color as long as it's black," he was not joking.

with every choice we move either closer to God or farther away from him.

What is voluntary comes from the will; what is forced comes to the will from outside and prevents it from doing what it will.

Even God cannot make us love him. "Forced love" is a meaningless impossibility, like "virtuous sin".

we have that the animal does not: reason and free will, or free choice.

4) But only man knows consciously and rationally, and only man's loves can be conscious and rational and responsible through free will.

Even today, we must choose. Will we be marked as God's own in our hearts and in our actions? Or will we be marked as Satan's own? Will we stand for Christ, His Son, no matter the personal cost?

Every act of man would from the very first have to be a moral act, an act of choice for or against God. Hence man would even in every act of knowledge manifest true righteousness and true holiness.

In this life, we have to make many choices. Some are very important choices. Some are not. Many of our choices are between good and evil. The choices we make, however, determine to a large extent our happiness or our unhappiness, because we have to live with the consequences of our choices.

Man and woman, in a world without suffering, chose against God.

Not even God, with all his power, can force a human being to love.

I have found consolation, for example, in C. S. Lewis's depiction in The Great Divorce of hell as a place that people choose, and continue to choose even when they end up there. As Milton's Satan put it, Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.