t, ut (postea) hoc (ipsi) erepto
(ipsum) afficiat dolore. Unde etiam illud est dictum:

_Bona magna multis non amicus dat Deus,_
_Insigniore ut rursus his privet malo._)

All these objections depend almost on the same sophism; they change and
mutilate the fact, they only half record things: God has care for men, he
loves the human race, he wishes it well, nothing so true. Yet he allows men
to fall, he often allows them to perish, he gives them goods that tend
towards their destruction; and when he makes someone happy, it is after
many sufferings: where is his affection, where is his goodness or again
where is his power? Vain objections, which suppress the main point, which
ignore the fact that it is of God one speaks. It is as though one were
speaking of a mother, a guardian, a tutor, whose well-nigh only care is
concerned with the upbringing, the preservation, the happiness of the
person in question, and who neglect their duty. God takes care of the
universe, he neglects nothing, he chooses what is best on the whole. If in
spite of all that someone is wicked and unhappy, it behoved him to be so.
God (so they say) could have given happiness to all, he could have given it
promptly and easily, and without causing himself any inconvenience, for he
can do all. But should he? Since he does not so, it is a sign that he had
to act altogether differently. If we infer from this either that God only
regretfully, and owing to lack of power, fails to make men happy and to
give the good first of all and without admixture of evil, or else that he
lacks the good will to give it unreservedly and for good and all, then we
are comparing our true God with the God of Herodotus, full of envy, or with
the demon of the poet whose iambics Aristotle quotes, and I have just
translated into Latin, who gives good things in order that he may cause
more affliction by taking them away. That would be trifling with God in
perpetual anthropomorphisms, representing him as a man who must give
himself up completely to one particular business, whose goodness must be
chiefly exercised upon those objects alone which are known to us, and who
lacks either aptitude or good will. God is not lacking therein, he could do
the good that we would desire; he even wishes it, taking it separately, but
he must not do it in preference to other greater goods which are opposed to
it. Moreover, one has no cause to complain of the fact that usually [197]
one attains salv