hy taking away vice, which it is not
expedient to take away, does something repugnant both to reason and God.
Besides this, saying that God resists some injustices, he again makes
plain the impiety of sins.

Having often written that there is nothing reprehensible, nothing to
be complained of in the world, all things being finished according to a
most excellent nature, he again elsewhere leaves certain negligences
to be reprehended, and those not concerning small or base matters. For
having in his Third Book of Substance related that some such things
befall honest and good men, he says: "May it not be that some things are
not regarded, as in great families some bran--yea, and some grains
of corn also--are scattered, the generality being nevertheless well
ordered; or maybe there are evil Genii set over those things in which
there are real and faulty negligence?" And he also affirms that there
is much necessity intermixed. I let pass, how inconsiderate it is
to compare such accidents befalling honest and good men, as were the
condemnation of Socrates, the burning of Pythagoras, whilst he was
yet living, by the Cyloneans, the putting to death--and that with
torture--of Zeno by the tyrant Demylus, and of Antiphon by Dionysius,
with the letting of bran fall. But that there should be evil Genii
placed by Providence over such charges,--how can it but be a reproach
to God, as it would be to a king, to commit the administration of his
provinces to evil and rash governors and captains, and suffer the best
of his subjects to be despised and ill-treated by them? And furthermore,
if there is much necessity mixed amongst affairs, then God has not power
over them all, nor are they all administered according to his reason.

He contends much against Epicurus and those that take away providence
from the conceptions we have of the gods, whom we esteem beneficial and
gracious to men. And these things being frequently said by them, there
is no necessity of setting down the words. Yet all do not conceive the
gods to be good and favorable to us. For see what the Jews and Syrians
think of the gods; consider also with how much superstition the poets
are filled. But there is not any one, in a manner to speak of, that
imagines God to be corruptible or to have been born. And to omit all
others, Antipater the Tarsian, in his book of the gods writes thus, word
for word: "At the opening of our discourse we will briefly repeat the
opinion we have con