meet none of them.  And the consideration of the wickedness of men, which brings upon them well-nigh all their misfortunes, shows at least that they have no right to complain.  No justice need trouble itself over the origin of a scoundrel’s wickedness when it is only a question of punishing him:  it is quite another matter when it is a question of prevention.  One knows well that disposition, upbringing, conversation, and often chance itself, have much share in that origin:  is the man any the less deserving of punishment?

265.  I confess that there still remains another difficulty.  If God is not bound to account to the wicked for their wickedness, it seems as if he owes to himself, and to those who honour him and love him, justification for his course of action with regard to the permission of vice and crime.  But God has already given that satisfaction, as far as it is needed here on earth:  by granting us the light of reason he has bestowed upon us the means whereby we may meet all difficulties.  I hope that I have made it plain in this discourse, and have elucidated the matter in the preceding portion of these Essays, almost as far as it can be done through general arguments.  Thereafter, the permission of sin being justified, the other evils [290] that are a consequence thereof present no further difficulty.  Thus also I am justified in restricting myself here to the evil of guilt to account for the evil of punishment, as Holy Scripture does, and likewise well-nigh all the Fathers of the Church and the Preachers.  And, to the end that none may say that is only good per la predica, it is enough to consider that, after the solutions I have given, nothing must seem more right or more exact than this method.  For God, having found already among things possible, before his actual decrees, man misusing his freedom and bringing upon himself his misfortune, yet could not avoid admitting him into existence, because the general plan required this.  Wherefore it will no longer be necessary to say with M. Jurieu that one must dogmatize like St. Augustine and preach like Pelagius.

266.  This method, deriving the evil of punishment from the evil of guilt, cannot be open to censure, and serves especially to account for the greatest physical evil, which is damnation.  Ernst Sonner, sometime Professor of Philosophy at Altorf (a university established in the territory of the free city of Nuremberg), who was considered an excellent Aristotelian, but was finally recognized as being secretly a Socinian, had composed a little discourse entitled:  Demonstration against the Eternity of Punishment.  It was founded on this somewhat trite principle, that there is no proportion between an infinite punishment and a finite guilt.  It was conveyed to me, printed (so it seemed) in Holland; and I replied that there was one thing to be considered which had escaped the late Herr Sonner:  namely that it was enough to say that the duration of the guilt caused the duration