but he need not be taken into account, not having advanced far enough in subjects of this kind.  He makes a vigorous protest against the absolute decree, in his Fecialis divinus, and yet he approves what is worst in the opinions of the champions of this decree, and without which this decree (as others of the Reformed explain) becomes endurable.  Aristotle was very orthodox on this matter of justice, and the Schoolmen followed him:  they distinguish, just as Cicero and the Jurists do, between perpetual right, which is binding on all and everywhere, and positive right, which is only for certain times and certain peoples.  I once read with enjoyment the Euthyphro of Plato, who makes Socrates uphold the truth on that point, and M. Bayle has called attention to the same passage.

183.  M. Bayle himself upholds this truth with considerable force in a certain passage, which it will be well to quote here in its entirety, long as it is (vol.  II of the Continuation of Divers Thoughts on the Comet, ch. 152, p. 771 seqq.):  ’According to the teaching of countless writers of importance’, he says, ’there is in nature and in the essence of certain things a moral good or evil that precedes the divine decree.  They prove this doctrine principally through the frightful consequences that attend the opposite dogma.  Thus from the proposition that to do wrong to no man would be a good action, not in itself but by an arbitrary dispensation of God’s will, it would follow that God could have given to man a law directly opposed at all points to the commandments of the Decalogue.  That is horrifying.  But here is a more direct proof, one derived from metaphysics.  One thing is certain, that the existence of God is not an effect of his will.  He exists not because he wills his existence, but through the [242] necessity of his infinite nature.  His power and his knowledge exist through the same necessity.  He is all-powerful, he knows all things, not because he wills it thus, but because these are attributes necessarily identified with him.  The dominion of his will relates only to the exercise of his power, he gives effect outside himself only to that which he wills, and he leaves all the rest in the state of mere possibility.  Thence it comes that this dominion extends only over the existence of creatures, and not over their essential being.  God was able to create matter, a man, a circle, or leave them in nothingness, but he was not able to produce them without giving them their essential properties.  He had of necessity to make man a rational animal and to give the round shape to a circle, since, according to his eternal ideas, independent of the free decrees of his will, the essence of man lay in the properties of being animal and rational, and since the essence of the circle lay in having a circumference equally distant from the centre as to all its parts.  This is what has caused the Christian philosophers to acknowledge that the essences