176.  Those who believe that God established good and evil by an arbitrary decree are adopting that strange idea of mere indifference, and other absurdities still stranger.  They deprive God of the designation good:  for what cause could one have to praise him for what he does, if in doing something quite different he would have done equally well?  And I have very often been surprised that divers Supralapsarian theologians, as for instance Samuel Rutherford, a Professor of Theology in Scotland, who wrote when the controversies with the Remonstrants were at their height, could have been deluded by so strange an idea.  Rutherford (in his Exercitationes Apologeticae pro Gratia) says positively that nothing is unjust or morally bad in God’s eyes before he has forbidden it:  thus without this prohibition it would be a matter of indifference whether one murdered or saved a [237] man, loved God or hated him, praised or blasphemed him.  Nothing is so unreasonable as that.  One may teach that God established good and evil by a positive law, or one may assert that there was something good and just before his decree, but that he is not required to conform to it, and that nothing prevents him from acting unjustly and from perhaps condemning innocence:  but it all comes to the same thing, offering almost equal dishonour to God.  For if justice was established arbitrarily and without any cause, if God came upon it by a kind of hazard, as when one draws lots, his goodness and his wisdom are not manifested in it, and there is nothing at all to attach him to it.  If it is by a purely arbitrary decree, without any reason, that he has established or created what we call justice and goodness, then he can annul them or change their nature.  Thus one would have no reason to assume that he will observe them always, as it would be possible to say he will observe them on the assumption that they are founded on reasons.  The same would hold good more or less if his justice were different from ours, if (for example) it were written in his code that it is just to make the innocent eternally unhappy.  According to these principles also, nothing would compel God to keep his word or would assure us of its fulfilment.  For why should the law of justice, which states that reasonable promises must be kept, be more inviolable for him than any other laws?

177.  All these three dogmas, albeit a little different from one another, namely, (1) that the nature of justice is arbitrary, (2) that it is fixed, but it is not certain that God will observe it, and finally (3) that the justice we know is not that which he observes, destroy the confidence in God that gives us tranquillity, and the love of God that makes our happiness.  There is nothing to prevent such a God from behaving as a tyrant and an enemy of honest folk, and from taking pleasure in that which we call evil.  Why should he not, then, just as well be the evil principle of the Manichaeans as the single