be miserable’.  M. Jacquelot in his book on The Conformity of Faith with Reason (p. 220) is of opinion ’that the damned must remain eternally deprived of the glory of the blessed, and that this deprivation might well be the origin and the cause of all their pains, through the reflexions these unhappy creatures make upon their crimes which have deprived them of an eternal bliss.  One knows what burning regrets, what pain envy causes to those who see themselves deprived of a good, of a notable honour which had been offered to them, and which [292] they rejected, especially when they see others invested with it.’  This position is a little different from that of M. Jurieu, but both agree in this sentiment, that the damned are themselves the cause of the continuation of their torments.  M. le Clerc’s Origenist does not entirely differ from this opinion when he says in the Select Library (vol. 7, p. 341):  ’God, who foresaw that man would fall, does not condemn him on that account, but only because, although he has the power to recover himself, he yet does not do so, that is, he freely retains his evil ways to the end of his life.’  If he carries this reasoning on beyond this life, he will ascribe the continuation of the pains of the wicked to the continuation of their guilt.

269.  M. Bayle says (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, ch. 175, p. 1188) ’that this dogma of the Origenist is heretical, in that it teaches that damnation is not founded simply on sin, but on voluntary impenitence’:  but is not this voluntary impenitence a continuation of sin?  I would not simply say, however, that it is because man, having the power to recover himself, does not; and would wish to add that it is because man does not take advantage of the succour of grace to aid him to recover himself.  But after this life, though one assume that the succour ceases, there is always in the man who sins, even when he is damned, a freedom which renders him culpable, and a power, albeit remote, of recovering himself, even though it should never pass into action.  And there is no reason why one may not say that this degree of freedom, exempt from necessity, but not exempt from certainty, remains in the damned as well as in the blessed.  Moreover, the damned have no need of a succour that is needed in this life, for they know only too well what one must believe here.

270.  The illustrious prelate of the Anglican Church who published recently a book on the origin of evil, concerning which M. Bayle made some observations in the second volume of his Reply, speaks with much subtlety about the pains of the damned.  This prelate’s opinion is presented (according to the author of the Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres, June 1703) as if he made ’of the damned just so many madmen who will feel their miseries acutely, but who will nevertheless congratulate themselves on their own behaviour, and who will rather choose to be, and to be that which they are, than