aided by such and such graces, attain to final faith and to salvation; and how others, with or without such or other graces, do not attain thereto, continue in sin, and are damned.  God grants his sanction to this sequence only after having entered into all its detail, and thus pronounces nothing final as to those who shall be saved or damned without having pondered upon everything and compared it with other possible sequences.  Thus God’s pronouncement concerns the whole sequence at the same time; he simply decrees its existence.  In order to save other men, or in a different way, he must needs choose an altogether different sequence, seeing that all is connected in each sequence.  In this conception of the matter, which is that most worthy of the All-wise, all whose actions are connected together to the highest possible degree, there would be only one total decree, which is to create such a world.  This total decree comprises equally all the particular decrees, without setting one of them before or after another.  Yet one may say also that each particular act of antecedent will entering into the total result has its value and order, in proportion to the good whereto this act inclines.  But these acts of antecedent will are not called decrees, since they are not yet inevitable, the outcome depending upon the total result.  According to this conception of things, all the difficulties that can here be made amount to the same as those I have already stated and removed in my inquiry concerning the origin of evil.

85.  There remains only one important matter of discussion, which has its peculiar difficulties.  It is that of the dispensation of the means and circumstances contributing to salvation and to damnation.  This comprises amongst others the subject of the Aids of Grace (de auxiliis gratiae), on which Rome (since the Congregation de Auxiliis under Clement VIII, when a debate took place between the Dominicans and the Jesuits) does not readily permit books to be published.  Everyone must agree that God is [169] altogether good and just, that his goodness makes him contribute the least possible to that which can render men guilty, and the most possible to that which serves to save them (possible, I say, subject to the general order of things); that his justice prevents him from condemning innocent men, and from leaving good actions without reward; and that he even keeps an exact proportion in punishments and rewards.  Nevertheless, this idea that one should have of the goodness and the justice of God does not appear enough in what we know of his actions with regard to the salvation and the damnation of men:  and it is that which makes difficulties concerning sin and its remedies.