unless
there be a cause so disposed as to produce the effect, this taking place no
less in voluntary than in all other actions. According to which it appears
that man is compelled to do the good and evil that he does, and in
consequence that he deserves therefor neither recompense nor chastisement:
thus is the morality of actions destroyed and all justice, divine and
human, shaken.

3. But even though one should grant to man this freedom wherewith he arrays
himself to his own hurt, the conduct of God could not but provide matter
for a criticism supported by the presumptuous ignorance of men, who would
wish to exculpate themselves wholly or in part at the expense of God. It is
objected that all the reality and what is termed the substance of the act
in sin itself is a production of God, since all creatures and all their
actions derive from him that reality they have. Whence one could infer not
only that he is the physical cause of sin, but also that he is its moral
cause, since he acts with perfect freedom and does nothing without a
complete knowledge of the thing and the consequences that it may have. Nor
is it enough to say that God has made for himself a law to co-operate with
the wills or resolutions of man, whether we express ourselves in terms of
the common opinion or in terms of the system of occasional causes. Not only
will it be found strange that he should have made such a law for himself,
of whose results he was not ignorant, but the principal difficulty is that
it seems the evil will itself cannot exist without co-operation, and even
without some predetermination, on his part, which contributes towards
begetting this will in man or in some other rational creature. For an
action is not, for being evil, the less dependent on God. Whence one will
come at last to the conclusion that God does all, the good and the evil,
indifferently; unless one pretend with the Manichaeans that there are two
principles, the one good and the other evil. Moreover, according to the
general opinion of theologians and philosophers, conservation being a [125]
perpetual creation, it will be said that man is perpetually created corrupt
and erring. There are, furthermore, modern Cartesians who claim that God is
the sole agent, of whom created beings are only the purely passive organs;
and M. Bayle builds not a little upon that idea.

4. But even granting that God should co-operate in actions only with a
general co-operation, or even not a