163.  Here is M. Bayle’s reply to that (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, ch. 154, p. 943):  ’This great philosopher is much mistaken, it seems to me.  There would not be in this monarch any degree of will, either small or great, that these two noblemen should obey the law, and not fight.  He would will entirely and solely that they should fight.  That would not exculpate them, they would only follow their passion, they would be unaware that they conformed to the will of their sovereign:  but he would be in truth the moral cause of their encounter, and he would not more entirely wish it supposing he were to inspire them with the desire or to give them the order for it.  Imagine to yourself two princes each of whom wishes his eldest son to poison himself.  One employs constraint, the other contents himself with secretly causing a grief that he knows will be sufficient to induce his son to poison himself.  Will you be doubtful whether the will of the latter is less complete than the will of the former?  M. Descartes is therefore assuming an unreal fact and does not at all solve the difficulty.’

164.  One must confess that M. Descartes speaks somewhat crudely of the will of God in regard to evil in saying not only that God knew that our free will would determine us toward some particular thing, but also that he also wished it, albeit he did not will to constrain the will thereto.  He speaks no less harshly in the eighth letter of the same volume, saying that not the slightest thought enters into the mind of a man which God does not will, and has not willed from all eternity, to enter there.  Calvin never said anything harsher; and all that can only be excused if it is to be understood of a permissive will.  M. Descartes’ solution amounts to the distinction between the will expressed in the sign and the will expressive of the good pleasure (inter voluntatem signi et beneplaciti) which the moderns have taken from the Schoolmen as regards the terms, but to which they have given a meaning not usual among the ancients.  It is true that God may command something and yet not will that it be done, as when he commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son:  he willed the obedience, and he did not will the action.  But when God commands the virtuous action and [226] forbids the sin, he wills indeed that which he ordains, but it is only by an antecedent will, as I have explained more than once.

165.  M. Descartes’ comparison is therefore not satisfactory; but it may be made so.  One must make some change in the facts, inventing some reason to oblige the prince to cause or permit the two enemies to meet.  They must, for instance, be together in the army or in other obligatory functions, a circumstance the prince himself cannot hinder without endangering his State.  For example, the absence of either of them might be responsible for the disappearance of innumerable persons of his party from the army or cause grumbling among the soldiers and give rise to