e and without their
asking for it; so that he would be more answerable for the unhappiness it
would bring upon them than if he had only granted it in response to their
importunate prayers.'

What was said at the end of the remark on the preceding maxim ought to be
repeated here, and is sufficient to counter the present maxim. Moreover,
the author is still presupposing that false maxim advanced as the third,
stating that the happiness of rational creatures is the sole aim of God. If
that were so, perhaps neither sin nor unhappiness would ever occur, even by
concomitance. God would have chosen a sequence of possibles where all these
evils would be excluded. But God would fail in what is due to the universe,
that is, in what he owes to himself. If there were only spirits they would
be without the required connexion, without the order of time and place.
This order demands matter, movement and its laws; to adjust these to
spirits in the best possible way means to return to our world. When one
looks at things only in the mass, one imagines to be practicable a thousand
things that cannot properly take place. To wish that God should not give
free will to rational creatures is to wish that there be none of these
creatures; and to wish that God should prevent them from misusing it is to
wish that there be none but these creatures alone, together with what was
made for them only. If God had none but these creatures in view, he would
doubtless prevent them from destroying themselves. One may say in a sense,
however, that God has given to these creatures the art of always making
good use of their free will, for the natural light of reason is this art.
But it would be necessary always to have the will to do good, and often
creatures lack the means of giving themselves the will they ought to have;
often they even lack the will to use those means which indirectly give a
good will. Of this I have already spoken more than once. This fault must be
admitted, and one must even acknowledge that God would perhaps have been
able to exempt creatures from that fault, since there is nothing to
prevent, so it seems, the existence of some whose nature it would be always
to have good will. But I reply that it is not necessary, and that it was
not feasible for all rational creatures to have so great a perfection,[193]
and such as would bring them so close to the Divinity. It may even be that
that can only be made possible by a special divine grace. But