note to My Lord Newcastle, desiring him to induce Mr. Hobbes to answer it.  He answered; but at the same time he expressed a wish that his answer should not be published, because he believed it possible for ill-instructed persons to abuse dogmas such as his, however true they might be.  It so happened, however, that Mr. Hobbes himself passed it to a French friend, and allowed a young Englishman to translate it into French for the benefit of this friend.  This young man kept a copy of the English original, and published it later in England without the author’s knowledge.  Thus the bishop was obliged to reply to it, and Mr. Hobbes to make a rejoinder, and to [394] publish all the pieces together in a book of 348 pages printed in London in the year 1656, in 4to., entitled, Questions concerning Freedom, Necessity and Chance, elucidated and discussed between Doctor Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury.  There is a later edition, of the year 1684, in a work entitled Hobbes’s Tripos, where are to be found his book on human nature, his treatise on the body politic and his treatise on freedom and necessity; but the latter does not contain the bishop’s reply, nor the author’s rejoinder.  Mr. Hobbes argues on this subject with his usual wit and subtlety; but it is a pity that in both the one and the other we stumble upon petty tricks, such as arise in excitement over the game.  The bishop speaks with much vehemence and behaves somewhat arrogantly.  Mr. Hobbes for his part is not disposed to spare the other, and manifests rather too much scorn for theology, and for the terminology of the Schoolmen, which is apparently favoured by the bishop.

2.  One must confess that there is something strange and indefensible in the opinions of Mr. Hobbes.  He maintains that doctrines touching the divinity depend entirely upon the determination of the sovereign, and that God is no more the cause of the good than of the bad actions of creatures.  He maintains that all that which God does is just, because there is none above him with power to punish and constrain him.  Yet he speaks sometimes as if what is said about God were only compliments, that is to say expressions proper for paying him honour, but not for knowing him.  He testifies also that it seems to him that the pains of the wicked must end in their destruction:  this opinion closely approaches that of the Socinians, but it seems that Mr. Hobbes goes much further.  His philosophy, which asserts that bodies alone are substances, hardly appears favourable to the providence of God and the immortality of the soul.  On other subjects nevertheless he says very reasonable things.  He shows clearly that nothing comes about by chance, or rather that chance only signifies the ignorance of causes that produce the effect, and that for each effect there must be a concurrence of all the sufficient conditions anterior to the event, not one of which, manifestly, can be lacking when the event is to follow, because they are conditions:  the event, moreover, does not fail to follow when these conditions exist all together, because they are sufficient conditions.  All which amounts to the same as I have said so many times, that everything comes to pass as a result of determining reasons, the knowledge [395] whereof, if we had it, would make us know at the same time why the thing has happened and why it did not go otherwise.