aught. But Molina contents himself with finding
therein generally a reason for the decrees of God, founded on what the free
creature would do in such and such circumstances.

41. I will not enter into all the detail of this controversy; it will
suffice for me to give one instance. Certain older writers, not acceptable
to St. Augustine and his first disciples, appear to have had ideas somewhat
approaching those of Molina. The Thomists and those who call themselves
disciples of St. Augustine (but whom their opponents call Jansenists)
combat this doctrine on philosophical and theological grounds. Some [146]
maintain that mediate knowledge must be included in the knowledge of mere
intelligence. But the principal objection is aimed at the foundation of
this knowledge. For what foundation can God have for seeing what the people
of Keilah would do? A simple contingent and free act has nothing in itself
to yield a principle of certainty, unless one look upon it as predetermined
by the decrees of God, and by the causes that are dependent upon them.
Consequently the difficulty existing in actual free actions will exist also
in conditional free actions, that is to say, God will know them only under
the condition of their causes and of his decrees, which are the first
causes of things: and it will not be possible to separate such actions from
those causes so as to know a contingent event in a way that is independent
of the knowledge of its causes. Therefore all must of necessity be traced
back to the predetermination of God's decrees, and this mediate knowledge
(so it will be said) will offer no remedy. The theologians who profess to
be adherents of St. Augustine claim also that the system of the Molinists
would discover the source of God's grace in the good qualities of man, and
this they deem an infringement of God's honour and contrary to St. Paul's
teaching.

42. It would be long and wearisome to enter here into the replies and
rejoinders coming from one side and the other, and it will suffice for me
to explain how I conceive that there is truth on both sides. For this
result I resort to my principle of an infinitude of possible worlds,
represented in the region of eternal verities, that is, in the object of
the divine intelligence, where all conditional futurities must be
comprised. For the case of the siege of Keilah forms part of a possible
world, _which differs from ours only in all that is connected with this
hypothesis_