will positively, and which are in fact worthy to be the object of his will.  Of such are piety, charity and every virtuous action that God commands; of such is omission of sin, a thing more alien to divine perfection than any other.  It is therefore incomparably better to explain the will of God as I have explained it in this work.  Thus I shall say that God, by virtue of his supreme goodness, has in the beginning a serious inclination to produce, or to see and cause to be produced, all good and every laudable action, and to prevent, or to see and cause to fail, all evil and every bad action.  But he is determined by this same goodness, united to an infinite wisdom, and by the very concourse of all the previous and particular inclinations towards each good, and towards the preventing of each evil, to produce the best possible design of things.  This is his final and decretory will.  And this design of the best being of such a nature that the good must be enhanced therein, as light is enhanced by shade, by some evil which is incomparably less than this good, God could not have excluded this evil, nor introduced certain goods that were excluded from this plan, without wronging his supreme perfection.  So for that reason one must say that he permitted the sins of others, because otherwise he would have himself performed an action worse than all the sin of creatures.

12.  I find that the Bishop of Derry is at least justified in saying, article XV, in his Reply, p. 153, that the opinion of his opponents is contrary to piety, when they ascribe all to God’s power only, and that Mr. Hobbes ought not to have said that honour or worship is only a sign of the power of him whom one honours:  for one may also, and one must, acknowledge and honour wisdom, goodness, justice and other perfections. Magnos facile laudamus, bonos libenter. This opinion, which despoils God of all goodness and of all true justice, which represents him as a Tyrant, wielding an absolute power, independent of all right and of all equity, and [403] creating millions of creatures to be eternally unhappy, and this without any other aim than that of displaying his power, this opinion, I say, is capable of rendering men very evil; and if it were accepted no other Devil would be needed in the world to set men at variance among themselves and with God; as the Serpent did in making Eve believe that God, when he forbade her the fruit of the tree, did not will her good.  Mr. Hobbes endeavours to parry this thrust in his Rejoinder (p. 160) by saying that goodness is a part of the power of God, that is to say, the power of making himself worthy of love.  But that is an abuse of terms by an evasion, and confounds things that must be kept distinct.  After all, if God does not intend the good of intelligent creatures, if he has no other principles of justice than his power alone, which makes him produce either arbitrarily that which chance presents to him, or by necessity all that which