196.  It is therefore not a question of a creature, but of the universe; and the adversary will be obliged to maintain that one possible universe may be better than the other, to infinity; but there he would be mistaken, and it is that which he cannot prove.  If this opinion were true, it would follow that God had not produced any universe at all:  for he is incapable of acting without reason, and that would be even acting against reason.  It is as if one were to suppose that God had decreed to make a material sphere, with no reason for making it of any particular size.  This decree would be useless, it would carry with it that which would prevent its effect.  It would be quite another matter if God decreed to draw from a given point one straight line to another given straight line, without any determination of the angle, either in the decree or in its circumstances.  For in this case the determination would spring from the nature of the thing, the line would be perpendicular, and the angle would be right, since that is all that is determined and distinguishable.  It is thus one must think of the creation of the best of all possible universes, all the more since God not only decrees to create a universe, but decrees also to create the best of all.  For God decrees nothing without knowledge, and he makes no separate decrees, which would be nothing but antecedent acts of will:  and these we have sufficiently explained, distinguishing them from genuine decrees.

197.  M. Diroys, whom I knew in Rome, theologian to Cardinal d’Estrees, wrote a book entitled Proofs and Assumptions in Favour of the [250] Christian Religion, published in Paris in the year 1683.  M. Bayle (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol.  III, ch. 165, p. 1058) recounts this objection brought up by M. Diroys:  ‘There is one more difficulty’, he says, ’which it is no less important to meet than those given earlier, since it causes more trouble to those who judge goods and evils by considerations founded on the purest and most lofty maxims.  This is that God being the supreme wisdom and goodness, it seems to them that he ought to do all things as wise and virtuous persons would wish them to be done, following the rules of wisdom and of goodness which God has imprinted in them, and as they would be obliged themselves to do these things if they depended upon them.  Thus, seeing that the affairs of the world do not go so well as, in their opinion, they might go, and as they would go if they interfered themselves, they conclude that God, who is infinitely better and wiser than they, or rather wisdom and goodness itself, does not concern himself with these affairs.’