the Styx. These laws and this judge do not constrain: they
are stronger, for they persuade. Wisdom only shows God the best possible
exercise of his goodness: after that, the evil that occurs is an inevitable
result of the best. I will add something stronger: To permit the evil, as
God permits it, is the greatest goodness.

_Si mala sustulerat, non erat ille bonus._

One would need to have a bent towards perversity to say after this that it
is more malicious to leave to someone the whole trouble and the whole blame
of his destruction. When God does leave it to a man, it has belonged to him
since before his existence; it was already in the idea of him as still
merely possible, before the decree of God which makes him to exist. Can
one, then, leave it or give it to another? There is the whole matter.

122. VII. 'A true benefactor gives promptly, and does not wait to give
until those he loves have suffered long miseries from the privation of what
he could have imparted to them at first very easily, and without causing
any inconvenience to himself. If the limitation of his forces does not
permit him to do good without inflicting pain or some other inconvenience,
he acquiesces in this, but only regretfully, and he never employs this way
of rendering service when he can render it without mingling any kind of
evil in his favours. If the profit one could derive from the evils he
inflicted could spring as easily from an unalloyed good as from those
evils, he would take the straight road of unalloyed good, and not the
indirect road that would lead from the evil to the good. If he showers
riches and honours, it is not to the end that those who have enjoyed them,
when they come to lose them, should be all the more deeply afflicted in
proportion to their previous experience of pleasure, and that thus they
should become more unhappy than the persons who have always been deprived
of these advantages. A malicious being would shower good things at such a
price upon the people for whom he had the most hatred.'

(Compare this passage of Aristotle, _Rhetor._, 1. 2, c. 23, p. m. 446:
[Greek: hoion ei doie an tis tini hina aphelomenos leipesei; hothen kai
tout' eiretai,]

[Greek: pollois ho daimon ou kat' eunoian pheron]
[Greek: Megala didosin eutychemat', all' hina]
[Greek: tas symphoras labosin epiphanesteras.]

[196]
Id est: Veluti si quis alicui aliquid de