Si non errasset, fecerat illa minus.

240.  I find that the famous English prelate who wrote an ingenious book on the origin of evil, some passages of which were disputed by M. Bayle [275] in the second volume of his Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, while disagreeing with some of the opinions that I have upheld here and appearing to resort sometimes to a despotic power, as if the will of God did not follow the rules of wisdom in relation to good or evil, but decreed arbitrarily that such and such a thing must be considered good or evil; and as if even the will of the creature, in so far as it is free, did not choose because the object appears good to him, but by a purely arbitrary determination, independent of the representation of the object; this bishop, I say, in other passages nevertheless says things which seem more in favour of my doctrine than of what appears contrary thereto in his own.  He says that what an infinitely wise and free cause has chosen is better than what it has not chosen.  Is not that recognizing that goodness is the object and the reason of his choice?  In this sense one will here aptly say: 

  Sic placuit superis; quaerere plura, nefas.

         &nb
sp;                                                     [276]
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ESSAYS ON THE JUSTICE OF GOD AND THE FREEDOM OF MAN IN THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

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PART THREE

241.  Now at last I have disposed of the cause of moral evil; physical evil, that is, sorrows, sufferings, miseries, will be less troublesome to explain, since these are results of moral evil. Poena est malum passionis, quod infligitur ob malum actionis, according to Grotius.  One suffers because one has acted; one suffers evil because one does evil.

    Nostrorum causa malorum
  Nos sumus.

It is true that one often suffers through the evil actions of others; but when one has no part in the offence one must look upon it as a certainty that these sufferings prepare for us a greater happiness.  The question of physical evil, that is, of the origin of sufferings, has difficulties in common with that of the origin of metaphysical evil, examples whereof are furnished by the monstrosities and other apparent irregularities of the universe.  But one must believe that even sufferings and monstrosities are part of order; and it is well to bear in mind not only that it was better to admit these defects and these monstrosities than to violate general laws, as Father Malebranche sometimes argues, but also that these very monstrosities are in the rules, and are in conformity with general acts of will, though we be not capable of discerning this conformity.  It is [277] just as sometimes there are appearances of irregularity in mathematics which issue finally in a great order when one has finally got to the bottom of them:  that is why I have already in this work observed that according to my principles all individual events, without exception, are consequences of general acts of will.