41.  I will not enter into all the detail of this controversy; it will suffice for me to give one instance.  Certain older writers, not acceptable to St. Augustine and his first disciples, appear to have had ideas somewhat approaching those of Molina.  The Thomists and those who call themselves disciples of St. Augustine (but whom their opponents call Jansenists) combat this doctrine on philosophical and theological grounds.  Some [146] maintain that mediate knowledge must be included in the knowledge of mere intelligence.  But the principal objection is aimed at the foundation of this knowledge.  For what foundation can God have for seeing what the people of Keilah would do?  A simple contingent and free act has nothing in itself to yield a principle of certainty, unless one look upon it as predetermined by the decrees of God, and by the causes that are dependent upon them.  Consequently the difficulty existing in actual free actions will exist also in conditional free actions, that is to say, God will know them only under the condition of their causes and of his decrees, which are the first causes of things:  and it will not be possible to separate such actions from those causes so as to know a contingent event in a way that is independent of the knowledge of its causes.  Therefore all must of necessity be traced back to the predetermination of God’s decrees, and this mediate knowledge (so it will be said) will offer no remedy.  The theologians who profess to be adherents of St. Augustine claim also that the system of the Molinists would discover the source of God’s grace in the good qualities of man, and this they deem an infringement of God’s honour and contrary to St. Paul’s teaching.

42.  It would be long and wearisome to enter here into the replies and rejoinders coming from one side and the other, and it will suffice for me to explain how I conceive that there is truth on both sides.  For this result I resort to my principle of an infinitude of possible worlds, represented in the region of eternal verities, that is, in the object of the divine intelligence, where all conditional futurities must be comprised.  For the case of the siege of Keilah forms part of a possible world, which differs from ours only in all that is connected with this hypothesis, and the idea of this possible world represents that which would happen in this case.  Thus we have a principle for the certain knowledge of contingent futurities, whether they happen actually or must happen in a certain case.  For in the region of the possibles they are represented as they are, namely, as free contingencies.  Therefore neither the foreknowledge of contingent futurities nor the foundation for the certainty of this foreknowledge should cause us perplexity or seem to prejudice freedom.  And though it were true and possible that contingent futurities consisting in free actions of reasonable creatures were entirely independent of the decrees of God and of external causes, there would [147] still be means of foreseeing them; for God would see them as they are in the region of the possibles, before he decrees to admit them into existence.