of the penalty.  Since the damned remained wicked they could not be withdrawn from their misery; and thus one need not, in order to justify the continuation of their sufferings, assume that sin has become of infinite weight through the infinite nature of the object offended, who is God.  This thesis I had not explored enough to pass judgement thereon.  I know that the general opinion of the Schoolmen, according to the Master of the Sentences, is that in the other life there is neither merit nor demerit; but I do not think that, taken literally, it can pass for an article of faith.  Herr Fecht, a famous theologian at Rostock, well refuted that in his book on The State of the Damned.  It is quite wrong, he says (Sec. 59); God cannot change his nature; justice is essential to him; death has closed the door of grace, but not that of justice.

[291] 267.  I have observed that sundry able theologians have accounted for the duration of the pains of the damned as I have just done.  Johann Gerhard, a famous theologian of the Augsburg Confession (in Locis Theol., loco de Inferno, Sec. 60), brings forward amongst other arguments that the damned have still an evil will and lack the grace that could render it good.  Zacharias Ursinus, a theologian of Heidelberg, who follows Calvin, having formulated this question (in his treatise De Fide) why sin merits an eternal punishment, advances first the common reason, that the person offended is infinite, and then also this second reason, quod non cessante peccato non potest cessare poena.  And the Jesuit Father Drexler says in his book entitled Nicetas, or Incontinence Overcome (book 2, ch. 11, Sec. 9):  ’Nec mirum damnatos semper torqueri, continue blasphemant, et sic quasi semper peccant, semper ergo plectuntur.’  He declares and approves the same reason in his work on Eternity (book 2, ch. 15) saying:  ’Sunt qui dicant, nec displicet responsum:  scelerati in locis infernis semper peccant, ideo semper puniuntur.’  And he indicates thereby that this opinion is very common among learned men in the Roman Church.  He alleges, it is true, another more subtle reason, derived from Pope Gregory the Great (lib. 4, Dial. c. 44), that the damned are punished eternally because God foresaw by a kind of mediate knowledge that they would always have sinned if they had always lived upon earth.  But it is a hypothesis very much open to question.  Herr Fecht quotes also various eminent Protestant theologians for Herr Gerhard’s opinion, although he mentions also some who think differently.

268.  M. Bayle himself in various places has supplied me with passages from two able theologians of his party, which have some reference to these statements of mine.  M. Jurieu in his book on the Unity of the Church, in opposition to that written by M. Nicole on the same subject, gives the opinion (p. 379) ’that reason tells us that a creature which cannot cease to be criminal can also not cease to