15.  Those whose humour it is to be well satisfied with Nature and with fortune and not to complain about them, even though they should not be the best endowed, appear to me preferable to the other sort; for besides that these complaints are ill founded, it is in effect murmuring against the orders of providence.  One must not readily be among the malcontents in the State where one is, and one must not be so at all in the city of God, wherein one can only wrongfully be of their number.  The books of human misery, such as that of Pope Innocent III, to me seem not of the most serviceable:  evils are doubled by being given an attention that ought to be averted from them, to be turned towards the good which by far preponderates.  Even less do I approve books such as that of Abbe Esprit, On the Falsity of Human Virtues, of which we have lately been given a summary:  for such a book serves to turn everything wrong side out, and cause men to be such as it represents them.

16.  It must be confessed, however, that there are disorders in this life, which appear especially in the prosperity of sundry evil men and in the misfortune of many good people.  There is a German proverb which even grants the advantage to the evil ones, as if they were commonly the most fortunate: 

  Je kruemmer Holz, je bessre Kruecke:
  Je aerger Schalck, je groesser Gluecke.

And it were to be desired that this saying of Horace should be true in our eyes: 

  Raro antecedentem scelestum
  Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Yet it often comes to pass also, though this perchance not the most often,

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  That in the world’s eyes Heaven is justified,

and that one may say with Claudian: 

  Abstulit hunc tandem Rufini poena tumultum,
  Absolvitque deos...

17.  But even though that should not happen here, the remedy is all prepared in the other life:  religion and reason itself teach us that, and we must not murmur against a respite which the supreme wisdom has thought fit to grant to men for repentance.  Yet there objections multiply on another side, when one considers salvation and damnation:  for it appears strange that, even in the great future of eternity, evil should have the advantage over good, under the supreme authority of him who is the sovereign good, since there will be many that are called and few that are chosen or are saved.  It is true that one sees from some lines of Prudentius (Hymn. ante Somnum),

Idem tamen benignus Ultor retundit iram, Paucosque non piorum Patitur perire in aevum,

that divers men believed in his time that the number of those wicked enough to be damned would be very small.  To some indeed it seems that men believed at that time in a sphere between Hell and Paradise;