that God must depart from the same law to prevent a wicked man from growing rich at the expense of a good man?  The more the wicked man sets himself above the promptings of conscience and of honour, the more does he exceed the good man in strength, so that if he comes to grips with the good man he must, according to the course of nature, ruin him.  If, moreover, they are both engaged in the business of finance, the wicked man must, according to the same course of nature, grow richer than the good man, just as a fierce fire consumes more wood than a fire of straw.  Those who would wish sickness for a wicked man are sometimes as unfair as those who would wish that a stone falling on a glass should not break it:  for his organs being arranged as they are, neither the food that he takes nor the air that he breathes can, according to natural laws, be detrimental to his health.  Therefore those who complain about his health complain of God’s failure to violate the laws which he has established.  And in this they are all the more unfair because, through combinations and concatenations which were in the power of God alone, it happens often enough that the course of nature brings about the punishment of sin.’

206.  It is a thousand pities that M. Bayle so soon quitted the way he had so auspiciously begun, of reasoning on behalf of providence:  for his work would have been fruitful, and in saying fine things he would have said good things as well.  I agree with Father Malebranche that God does things in the way most worthy of him.  But I go a little further than he, with regard to ‘general and particular acts of will’.  As God can do nothing without reasons, even when he acts miraculously, it follows that he has no will about individual events but what results from some general truth or will.  Thus I would say that God never has a particular will such as this Father implies, that is to say, a particular primitive will.

[257] 207.  I think even that miracles have nothing to distinguish them from other events in this regard:  for reasons of an order superior to that of Nature prompt God to perform them.  Thus I would not say, with this Father, that God departs from general laws whenever order requires it:  he departs from one law only for another law more applicable, and what order requires cannot fail to be in conformity with the rule of order, which is one of the general laws.  The distinguishing mark of miracles (taken in the strictest sense) is that they cannot be accounted for by the natures of created things.  That is why, should God make a general law causing bodies to be attracted the one to the other, he could only achieve its operation by perpetual miracles.  And likewise, if God willed that the organs of human bodies should conform to the will of the soul, according to the system of occasional causes, this law also would come into operation only through perpetual miracles.