men who have lived in this world according to His views, would He not
have had a court more numerous, more brilliant, and more honorable to
Him, if it were composed of all the men to whom, in creating them, He
could have granted the degree of goodness necessary to obtain eternal
happiness? Finally, were it not easier not to take man from nothingness
than to create him full of defects, rebellious to his Creator,
perpetually exposed to lose himself by a fatal abuse of his liberty?
Instead of creating men, a perfect God ought to have created only docile
and submissive angels. The angels, it is said, are free; a few among
them have sinned; but all of them have not sinned; all have not abused
their liberty by revolting against their Master. Could not God have
created only angels of the good kind? If God could create angels who
have not sinned, could He not create men sinless, or those who would
never abuse their liberty by doing evil. If the chosen ones are
incapable of sinning in heaven, could not God have made sinless men upon
the earth?

LXXVII.--IT IS ABSURD TO SAY THAT GOD'S CONDUCT MUST BE A MYSTERY TO MAN,
AND THAT HE HAS NO RIGHT TO EXAMINE AND JUDGE IT.

We are told that the enormous distance which separates God from men,
makes God's conduct necessarily a mystery for us, and that we have no
right to interrogate our Master. Is this statement satisfactory? But
according to you, when my eternal happiness is involved, have I not the
right to examine God's own conduct? It is but with the hope of happiness
that men submit to the empire of a God. A despot to whom men are
subjected but through fear, a master whom they can not interrogate, a
totally inaccessible sovereign, can not merit the homage of intelligent
beings. If God's conduct is a mystery to me, it is not made for me. Man
can not adore, admire, respect, or imitate a conduct of which everything
is impossible to conceive, or of which he can not form any but revolting
ideas; unless it is pretended that he should worship all the things of
which he is forced to be ignorant, and then all that he does not
understand becomes admirable.

Priests! you teach us that the designs of God are impenetrable; that His
ways are not our ways; that His thoughts are not our thoughts; that it
is folly to complain of His administration, whose motives and secret
ways are entirely unknown to us; that there is temerity in accusing Him
of unjust judgments, because they are incompreh