God will observe it, and finally (3) that the
justice we know is not that which he observes, destroy the confidence in
God that gives us tranquillity, and the love of God that makes our
happiness. There is nothing to prevent such a God from behaving as a tyrant
and an enemy of honest folk, and from taking pleasure in that which we call
evil. Why should he not, then, just as well be the evil principle of the
Manichaeans as the single good principle of the orthodox? At least he would
be neutral and, as it were, suspended between the two, or even sometimes
the one and sometimes the other. That would be as if someone were to say
that Oromasdes and Arimanius reign in turns, according to which of the two
is the stronger or the more adroit. It is like the saying of a certain
Moghul woman. She, so it seems, having heard it said that formerly under
Genghis Khan and his successors her nation had had dominion over most [238]
of the North and East, told the Muscovites recently, when M. Isbrand went
to China on behalf of the Czar, through the country of those Tartars, that
the god of the Moghuls had been driven from Heaven, but that one day he
would take his own place again. The true God is always the same: natural
religion itself demands that he be essentially as good and wise as he is
powerful. It is scarcely more contrary to reason and piety to say that God
acts without cognition, than to maintain that he has cognition which does
not find the eternal rules of goodness and of justice among its objects, or
again to say that he has a will such as heeds not these rules.

178. Some theologians who have written of God's right over creatures appear
to have conceded to him an unrestricted right, an arbitrary and despotic
power. They thought that would be placing divinity on the most exalted
level that may be imagined for it, and that it would abase the creature
before the Creator to such an extent that the Creator is bound by no laws
of any kind with respect to the creature. There are passages from Twiss,
Rutherford and some other Supralapsarians which imply that God cannot sin
whatever he may do, because he is subject to no law. M. Bayle himself
considers that this doctrine is monstrous and contrary to the holiness of
God (_Dictionary_, v. 'Paulicians', p. 2332 _in initio_); but I suppose
that the intention of some of these writers was less bad than it seems to
be. Apparently they meant by the term right, [Greek: anypeuthynian], a
state w