The Golden Verses of Pythagoras — with commentary (1917)

* Lactant., De Ird Dei, c. 13, p. 548.

« Diet, crit., art. MANicniENS, rem. D.

264 The Golden Verses of Pythagoras the world; but whilst he tfecovers his breath, observe that he admits a mixture of good and evil, and allow him to continue.

"Origen," he said, "asserts that evil has come from the wicked use of the free will. And why has God allowed man to have so pernicious a free will?" "Because," Origen answers, "an intelligent creature who had not enjoyed free will would have been immutable and immortal as God." What pitiable reason ! Is it that the glorified sotds, the saints, are equal to God, being predestined to good, and deprived of what is called jree will, which, according to Saint Augustine, is only the possibility of evil when the divine grace does not incline man towards the good?" "

Bayle, after several outbursts of this sort, finishes by declaring that the way in which evil is introduced under the rule of a sovereign being, infinitely good, infinitely potential, infinitely holy, is not only inexplicable but even incomprehensible.* Bayle is right on this point; also I have always said, in the course of this work, that the origin of evU, comprehensible or not, could never be divulged. But the matter of the origin of evil is not the question here. Bayle was too good a reasoner not to have felt it, not to have seen that the argument of Epicurus, and all the elocution with which he furnished it, did not bear upon the cause of evil' itself,' but upon its effects ; which is quite different. Epicurus did not demand that the origin of evil be explained to him, but the local existence of its effects — that is to say, one shot4d state clearly to him, that if God was able and willing to take away the evil from the world, or to prevent it from penetrating there, why he did not do so. When any one's house is the prey of flames, one is not so insensate as to be concerned with knowing what the essence of the fire is, and why it bums in general, but why it bums in particular; and why, being able to extinguish it, one has not done so. Bayle, I repeat, was too clever a logician not to have perceived this. This

« Did. crit. art. Marcionites, rem. E et G. i Ibid., art. Pauliciens, rem. E.

Examinations of the Golden Verses 265

I \ distinction was too simple to have escaped him; but seeing that its very simplicity had concealed it from the doctors of the Christian church, he was content to affect an ignorance of it to his adversaries, to have the pleasure, so precious to a skeptic such as he, of seeing them one after another exhaust themselves upon the argument of Epicurus :

God, whether he wills to take away evil, and can not ; whether he can and does not will to; whether he does not will it nor can; whether he wills it and can. If he wills it and can not, he is weak ; which does not accord with God. If he can and does riot will it, he is wicked; which accords with him no better. If he does not will it nor can, he is wicked and weak, which could not be. If he can and wills it, that which alone is worthy of his divinity, whence then come the evils? Or why does he not take them away?"