ensible to us. But do you
not see that by speaking in this manner, you destroy with your own hands
all your profound systems which have no design but to explain the ways
of Divinity that you call impenetrable? These judgments, these ways, and
these designs, have you penetrated them? You dare not say so; and,
although you season incessantly, you do not understand them more than we
do. If by chance you know the plan of God, which you tell us to admire,
while there are many people who find it so little worthy of a just,
good, intelligent, and rational being; do not say that this plan is
impenetrable. If you are as ignorant as we, have some indulgence for
those who ingenuously confess that they comprehend nothing of it, or
that they see nothing in it Divine. Cease to persecute for opinions
which you do not understand yourselves; cease to slander each other for
dreams and conjectures which are altogether contradictory; speak to us
of intelligible and truly useful things; and no longer tell us of the
impenetrable ways of a God, about which you do nothing but stammer and
contradict yourselves.

In speaking to us incessantly of the immense depths of Divine wisdom, in
forbidding us to fathom these depths by telling us that it is insolence
to call God to the tribunal of our humble reason, in making it a crime
to judge our Master, the theologians only confess the embarrassment in
which they find themselves as soon as they have to render account of the
conduct of a God, which they tell us is marvelous, only because it is
totally impossible for them to understand it themselves.

LXXVIII.--IT IS ABSURD TO CALL HIM A GOD OF JUSTICE AND GOODNESS, WHO
INFLICTS EVIL INDISCRIMINATELY ON THE GOOD AND THE WICKED, UPON THE
INNOCENT AND THE GUILTY; IT IS IDLE TO DEMAND THAT THE UNFORTUNATE
SHOULD CONSOLE THEMSELVES FOR THEIR MISFORTUNES, IN THE VERY ARMS OF THE
ONE WHO ALONE IS THE AUTHOR OF THEM.

Physical evil commonly passes as the punishment of sin. Calamities,
diseases, famines, wars, earthquakes, are the means which God employs to
chastise perverse men. Therefore, they have no difficulty in attributing
these evils to the severity of a just and good God. However, do we not
see these plagues fall indiscriminately upon the good and the wicked,
upon the impious and the pious, upon the innocent and the guilty? How
can we be made to admire, in this proceeding, the justice and the
goodness of a being, the idea of whom appears so consol