181.  To say that God, having resolved to create man just as he is, could not but have required of him piety, sobriety, justice and chastity, because it is impossible that the disorders capable of overthrowing or disturbing his work can please him, that is to revert in effect to the common opinion.  Virtues are virtues only because they serve perfection or prevent the imperfection of those who are virtuous, or even of those who have to do with them.  And they have that power by their nature and by the nature of rational creatures, before God decrees to create them.  To hold a different opinion would be as if someone were to say that the rules of proportion and harmony are arbitrary with regard to musicians because they occur in music only when one has resolved to sing or to play some instrument.  But that is exactly what is meant by being essential to good music:  for those rules belong to it already in the ideal state, even when none yet thinks of singing, since it is known that they must of necessity belong to it as soon as one shall sing.  In the same way virtues belong to the ideal state of the rational creature before God decrees to create it; and it is for that very reason we maintain that virtues are good by their nature.

182.  M. Bayle has inserted a special chapter in his Continuation of Divers Thoughts on the Comet (it is chapter 152) where he shows ’that the Christian Doctors teach that there are things which are just antecedently to God’s decrees’.  Some theologians of the Augsburg Confession censured some of the Reformed who appeared to be of a different opinion; and this error was regarded as if it were a consequence of the absolute decree, which doctrine seems to exempt the will of God from any kind of reason, ubi stat pro ratione voluntas.  But, as I have observed already on various occasions, Calvin himself acknowledged that the decrees of God are in conformity with justice and wisdom, although the reasons that might prove this conformity in detail are unknown to us.  Thus, according to him, the rules of goodness and of justice are anterior to the decrees of God.  M. Bayle, in the same place, quotes a passage from the celebrated M. Turretin which draws a distinction between natural divine laws and positive [241] divine laws.  Moral laws are of the first kind and ceremonial of the second.  Samuel Desmarests, a celebrated theologian formerly at Groningen, and Herr Strinesius, who is still at Frankfort on the Oder, advocated this same distinction; and I think that it is the opinion most widely accepted even among the Reformed.  Thomas Aquinas and all the Thomists were of the same opinion, with the bulk of the Schoolmen and the theologians of the Roman Church.  The Casuists also held to that idea:  I count Grotius among the most eminent of them, and he was followed in this point by his commentators.  Herr Pufendorf appeared to be of a different opinion, which he insisted on maintaining in the face of censure from some theologians;