Di cujus jurare timent et fallere Numen.

One would gladly stop, but too late, the request half heard,

              Voluit Deus ora loquentis
  Opprimere; exierat jam vox properata sub auras.

One would gladly draw back after the request was made, making vain remonstrances; but they press you, they say to you:  ’Do you make oaths that you will not keep?’ The law of the Styx is inviolable, one must needs submit to it; if one has erred in making the oath, one would err more in not keeping it; the promise must be fulfilled, however harmful it may be to him who exacts it.  It would be ruinous to you if you did not fulfil it.  It seems as though the moral of these fables implies that a supreme necessity may constrain one to comply with evil.  God, in truth, knows no other judge that can compel him to give what may turn to evil, he is not like Jupiter who fears the Styx.  But his own wisdom is the greatest judge that he can find, there is no appeal from its judgements:  they are the decrees of destiny.  The eternal verities, objects of his wisdom, are more [195] inviolable than the Styx.  These laws and this judge do not constrain:  they are stronger, for they persuade.  Wisdom only shows God the best possible exercise of his goodness:  after that, the evil that occurs is an inevitable result of the best.  I will add something stronger:  To permit the evil, as God permits it, is the greatest goodness.

  Si mala sustulerat, non erat ille bonus.

One would need to have a bent towards perversity to say after this that it is more malicious to leave to someone the whole trouble and the whole blame of his destruction.  When God does leave it to a man, it has belonged to him since before his existence; it was already in the idea of him as still merely possible, before the decree of God which makes him to exist.  Can one, then, leave it or give it to another?  There is the whole matter.

122.  VII.  ’A true benefactor gives promptly, and does not wait to give until those he loves have suffered long miseries from the privation of what he could have imparted to them at first very easily, and without causing any inconvenience to himself.  If the limitation of his forces does not permit him to do good without inflicting pain or some other inconvenience, he acquiesces in this, but only regretfully, and he never employs this way of rendering service when he can render it without mingling any kind of evil in his favours.  If the profit one could derive from the evils he inflicted could spring as easily from an unalloyed good as from those evils, he would take the straight road of unalloyed good, and not the indirect road that would lead from the evil to the good.  If he showers riches and honours, it is not to the end that those who have enjoyed them, when they come to lose them, should be all the more deeply afflicted in proportion to their previous experience of pleasure, and that thus they should become more unhappy than the persons who have always been deprived of these advantages.  A malicious being would shower good things at such a price upon the people for whom he had the most hatred.’