pardons those who become better:  he can distinguish them; and this severity is more consistent with perfect justice.  But if anyone asks why God gives not to all the grace of conversion, the question is of a different nature, having no relation to the present maxim.  I have already answered it in a sense, not in order to find God’s reasons, but to show that he cannot lack such, and that there are no opposing reasons of any validity.  Moreover, we know that sometimes whole cities are destroyed and the inhabitants put to the sword, to inspire terror in the rest.  That may serve to shorten a great war or a rebellion, and would mean a saving of blood through the shedding of it:  there is no decimation there.  We cannot assert, indeed, that the wicked of our globe are punished so severely in order to intimidate the inhabitants of the other globes and to make them better.  Yet an abundance of reasons in the universal harmony which are unknown to us, because we know not sufficiently the extent of the city of God, nor the form of the general republic of spirits, nor even the whole architecture of bodies, may produce the same effect.

134.  XIX.  ’Those physicians who chose, among many remedies capable of curing a sick man, whereof divers were such as they well knew he would take with enjoyment, precisely that one which they knew he would refuse to take, would vainly urge and pray him not to refuse it; we should still have just cause for thinking that they had no desire to cure him:  for if they wished to do so, they would choose for him among those good medicines one which they knew he would willingly swallow.  If, moreover, they knew that rejection of the remedy they offered him would augment his sickness to[206] the point of making it fatal, one could not help saying that, despite all their exhortations, they must certainly be desirous of the sick man’s death.’

God wishes to save all men:  that means that he would save them if men themselves did not prevent it, and did not refuse to receive his grace; and he is not bound or prompted by reason always to overcome their evil will.  He does so sometimes nevertheless, when superior reasons allow of it, and when his consequent and decretory will, which results from all his reasons, makes him resolve upon the election of a certain number of men.  He gives aids to all for their conversion and for perseverance, and these aids suffice in those who have good will, but they do not always suffice to give good will.  Men obtain this good will either through particular aids or through circumstances which cause the success of the general aids.  God cannot refrain from offering other remedies which he knows men will reject, bringing upon themselves all the greater guilt:  but shall one wish that God be unjust in order that man may be less criminal?  Moreover, the grace that does not serve the one may serve the other, and indeed always serves the totality of God’s plan, which is the best possible in