135.  I hope it will be found that nothing of what is comprised in the nineteen maxims of M. Bayle, which we have just considered, has been left without a necessary answer.  It is likely that, having often before meditated on this subject, he will have put there all his strongest convictions touching the moral cause of moral evil.  There are, however, still sundry passages here and there in his works which it will be well not to pass over in silence.  Very often he exaggerates the difficulty which he assumes with regard to freeing God from the imputation of sin.  He observes (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, ch. 161, p. 1024) that Molina, if he reconciled free will with foreknowledge, did not reconcile the goodness and the holiness of God with sin.  He praises the sincerity of those who bluntly declare (as he claims Piscator did) that everything is to be traced back to the will of God, and who maintain that God could not but be just, even though he were the author of sin, even though he condemned innocence.  And on the other side, or in other passages, he seems to show more approval of the opinions of those who preserve God’s goodness at [208] the expense of his greatness, as Plutarch does in his book against the Stoics.  ‘It was more reasonable’, he says, ‘to say’ (with the Epicureans) ‘that innumerable parts’ (or atoms flying about at haphazard through an infinite space) ’by their force prevailed over the weakness of Jupiter and, in spite of him and against his nature and will, did many bad and irrational things, than to agree that there is neither confusion nor wickedness but he is the author thereof.’  What may be said for both these parties, Stoics and Epicureans, appears to have led M. Bayle to the [Greek:  epechein] of the Pyrrhonians, the suspension of his judgement in respect of reason, so long as faith is set apart; and to that he professes sincere submission.

136.  Pursuing his arguments, however, he has gone as far as attempting almost to revive and reinforce those of the disciples of Manes, a Persian heretic of the third century after Christ, or of a certain Paul, chief of the Manichaeans in Armenia in the seventh century, from whom they were named Paulicians.  All these heretics renewed what an ancient philosopher of Upper Asia, known under the name of Zoroaster, had taught, so it is said, of two intelligent principles of all things, the one good, the other bad, a dogma that had perhaps come from the Indians.  Among them numbers of people still cling to their error, one that is exceedingly prone to overtake human ignorance and superstition, since very many barbarous peoples, even in America, have been deluded by it, without having had need of philosophy.  The Slavs (according to Helmold) had their Zernebog or black God.  The Greeks and Romans, wise as they seem to be, had a Vejovis or Anti-Jupiter, otherwise called Pluto, and numerous other maleficent divinities.  The Goddess Nemesis took pleasure in abasing those who were too fortunate; and Herodotus in some passages hints at his belief that all Divinity is envious; which, however, is not in harmony with the doctrine of the two principles.