situations wherein he might place them, so as to form a fitting resolve thereupon?  It appears to me that the two answers to this great question thus given as opposites to one another are easy to reconcile, and that in consequence the two parties would be agreed in principle, without any need of tolerance, if all were reduced to this point.  In truth God, in designing to create the world, purposed solely to manifest and communicate his perfections in the way that was most efficacious, and most worthy of his greatness, his wisdom and his goodness.  But that very purpose pledged him to consider all the actions of creatures while still in the state of pure possibility, that he might form the most fitting plan.  He is like a great architect whose aim in view is the satisfaction or the glory of having[165] built a beautiful palace, and who considers all that is to enter into this construction:  the form and the materials, the place, the situation, the means, the workmen, the expense, before he forms a complete resolve.  For a wise person in laying his plans cannot separate the end from the means; he does not contemplate any end without knowing if there are means of attaining thereto.

79.  I know not whether there are also perchance persons who imagine that, God being the absolute master of all things, one can thence infer that everything outside him is indifferent to him, that he considers himself alone, without concern for others, and that thus he has made some happy and others unhappy without any cause, without choice, without reason.  But to teach so about God were to deprive him of wisdom and of goodness.  We need only observe that he considers himself and neglects nothing of what he owes to himself, to conclude that he considers his creatures also, and that he uses them in the manner most consistent with order.  For the more a great and good prince is mindful of his glory, the more he will think of making his subjects happy, even though he were the most absolute of all monarchs, and though his subjects were slaves from birth, bondsmen (in lawyers’ parlance), people entirely in subjection to arbitrary power.  Calvin himself and some others of the greatest defenders of the absolute decree rightly maintained that God had great and just reasons for his election and the dispensation of his grace, although these reasons be unknown to us in detail:  and we must judge charitably that the most rigid predestinators have too much reason and too much piety to depart from this opinion.

80.  There will therefore be no argument for debate on that point (as I hope) with people who are at all reasonable.  But there will always be argument among those who are called Universalists and Particularists, according to what they teach of the grace and the will of God.  Yet I am somewhat inclined to believe that the heated dispute between them on the will of God to save all men, and on that which depends upon it (when one keeps separate the doctrine de Auxiliis,