l individuality_. Thus, if the
smallest evil that comes to pass in the world were missing in it, it [129]
would no longer be this world; which, with nothing omitted and all
allowance made, was found the best by the Creator who chose it.

10. It is true that one may imagine possible worlds without sin and without
unhappiness, and one could make some like Utopian or Sevarambian romances:
but these same worlds again would be very inferior to ours in goodness. I
cannot show you this in detail. For can I know and can I present infinities
to you and compare them together? But you must judge with me _ab effectu_,
since God has chosen this world as it is. We know, moreover, that often an
evil brings forth a good whereto one would not have attained without that
evil. Often indeed two evils have made one great good:

_Et si fata volunt, bina venena juvant_.

Even so two liquids sometimes produce a solid, witness the spirit of wine
and spirit of urine mixed by Van Helmont; or so do two cold and dark bodies
produce a great fire, witness an acid solution and an aromatic oil combined
by Herr Hoffmann. A general makes sometimes a fortunate mistake which
brings about the winning of a great battle; and do they not sing on the eve
of Easter, in the churches of the Roman rite:

_O certe necessarium Adae peccatum, quod Christi morte deletum est!_
_O felix culpa, quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!_

11. The illustrious prelates of the Gallican church who wrote to Pope
Innocent XII against Cardinal Sfondrati's book on predestination, being of
the principles of St. Augustine, have said things well fitted to elucidate
this great point. The cardinal appears to prefer even to the Kingdom of
Heaven the state of children dying without baptism, because sin is the
greatest of evils, and they have died innocent of all actual sin. More will
be said of that below. The prelates have observed that this opinion is ill
founded. The apostle, they say (Rom. iii. 8), is right to disapprove of the
doing of evil that good may come, but one cannot disapprove that God,
through his exceeding power, derive from the permitting of sins greater
goods than such as occurred before the sins. It is not that we ought to
take pleasure in sin, God forbid! but that we believe the same apostle when
he says (Rom. v. 20) that where sin abounded, grace did much more [130]
abound; and we remember that we have gained Jesus Christ himself by reason
of sin.