282.  It is therefore only necessary to understand fully some distinctions, such as that I have very often urged between the necessary and the [299] certain, and between metaphysical necessity and moral necessity.  It is the same with possibility and impossibility, since the event whose opposite is possible is contingent, even as that whose opposite is impossible is necessary.  A distinction is rightly drawn also between a proximate potency and a remote potency; and, according to these different senses, one says now that a thing may be and now that it may not be.  It may be said in a certain sense that it is necessary that the blessed should not sin; that the devils and the damned should sin; that God himself should choose the best; that man should follow the course which after all attracts him most.  But this necessity is not opposed to contingency; it is not of the kind called logical, geometrical or metaphysical, whose opposite implies contradiction.  M. Nicole has made use somewhere of a comparison which is not amiss.  It is considered impossible that a wise and serious magistrate, who has not taken leave of his senses, should publicly commit some outrageous action, as it would be, for instance, to run about the streets naked in order to make people laugh.  It is the same, in a sense, with the blessed; they are still less capable of sinning, and the necessity that forbids them to sin is of the same kind.  Finally I also hold that ‘will’ is a term as equivocal as potency and necessity.  For I have already observed that those who employ this axiom, that one does not fail to do what one wills when one can, and who thence infer that God therefore does not will the salvation of all, imply a decretory will.  Only in that sense can one support this proposition, that wisdom never wills what it knows to be among the things that shall not happen.  On the other hand, one may say, taking will in a sense more general and more in conformity with customary use, that the wise will is inclined antecedently to all good, although it decrees finally to do that which is most fitting.  Thus one would be very wrong to deny to God the serious and strong inclination to save all men, which Holy Scripture attributes to him; or even to attribute to him an original distaste which diverts him from the salvation of a number of persons, odium antecedaneum.  One should rather maintain that the wise mind tends towards all good, as good, in proportion to his knowledge and his power, but that he only produces the best that can be achieved.  Those who admit that, and yet deny to God the antecedent will to save all men, are wrong only in their misuse of the term, provided that they acknowledge, besides, that God gives to all help sufficient to enable them to win [300] salvation if only they have the will to avail themselves thereof.