149.  M. Bayle avows:  ’that one finds everywhere both moral good and physical good, some examples of virtue, some examples of happiness, and that this is what makes the difficulty.  For if there were only wicked and unhappy people’, he says, ’there would be no need to resort to the hypothesis of the two principles.’  I wonder that this admirable man could have evinced so great an inclination towards this opinion of the two principles; and I am surprised at his not having taken into account that this romance of human life, which makes the universal history of the human race, lay fully devised in the divine understanding, with innumerable others, and that the will of God only decreed its existence because this sequence of events was to be most in keeping with the rest of things, to bring forth the best result.  And these apparent faults in the whole world, these spots on a Sun whereof ours is but a ray, rather enhance its beauty than diminish it, contributing towards that end by obtaining a greater good.  There are in truth two principles, but they are both in God, to wit, his understanding and his will.  The understanding furnishes the principle of evil, without being sullied by it, without being evil; it represents natures as they exist in the eternal verities; it contains within it the reason wherefore evil is permitted:  but the will tends only towards good.  Let us add a third principle, namely power; it precedes even understanding and will, but it operates as the one displays it and as the other requires it.

150.  Some (like Campanella) have called these three perfections of God the three primordialities.  Many have even believed that there was therein a secret connexion with the Holy Trinity:  that power relates to the Father, that is, to the source of Divinity, wisdom to the Eternal Word, which is called logos by the most sublime of the Evangelists, and will or Love to the Holy Spirit.  Well-nigh all the expressions or comparisons derived from the nature of the intelligent substance tend that way.

151.  It seems to me that if M. Bayle had taken into account what I have just said of the principles of things, he would have answered his own questions, or at the least he would not have continued to ask, as he does in these which follow:  ’If man is the work of a single principle [218] supremely good, supremely holy, supremely powerful, can he be subject to diseases, to cold, heat, hunger, thirst, pain, grief?  Can he have so many evil tendencies?  Can he commit so many crimes?  Can supreme goodness produce an unhappy creature?  Shall not supreme power, united to an infinite goodness, shower blessings upon its work, and shall it not banish all that might offend or grieve?’ Prudentius in his Hamartigenia presented the same difficulty: