7.  Chapter II anatomizes evil, dividing it as we do into metaphysical, physical and moral.  Metaphysical evil consists in imperfections, physical evil in suffering and other like troubles, and moral evil in sin.  All these evils exist in God’s work; Lucretius thence inferred that there is no providence, and he denied that the world can be an effect of divinity: 

  Naturam rerum divinitus esse creatam;

because there are so many faults in the nature of things,

  quoniam tanta stat praedita culpa.

Others have admitted two principles, the one good, the other evil.  There have also been people who thought the difficulty insurmountable, and among these our author appears to have had M. Bayle in mind.  He hopes to [412] show in his work that it is not a Gordian knot, which needs to be cut; and he says rightly that the power, the wisdom and the goodness of God would not be infinite and perfect in their exercise if these evils had been banished.  He begins with the evil of imperfection in Chapter III and observes, as St. Augustine does, that creatures are imperfect, since they are derived from nothingness, whereas God producing a perfect substance from his own essence would have made thereof a God.  This gives him occasion for making a little digression against the Socinians.  But someone will say, why did not God refrain from producing things, rather than make imperfect things?  The author answers appositely that the abundance of the goodness of God is the cause.  He wished to communicate himself at the expense of a certain fastidiousness which we assume in God, imagining that imperfections offend him.  Thus he preferred that there should be the imperfect rather than nothing.  But one might have added that God has produced indeed the most perfect whole that was possible, one wherewith he had full cause for satisfaction, the imperfections of the parts serving a greater perfection in the whole.  Also the observation is made soon afterwards, that certain things might have been made better, but not without other new and perhaps greater disadvantages.  This perhaps could have been omitted:  for the author also states as a certainty, and rightly so, at the end of the chapter, that it appertains to infinite goodness to choose the best; and thus he was able to draw this conclusion a little earlier, that imperfect things will be added to those more perfect, so long as they do not preclude the existence of the more perfect in as great a number as possible.  Thus bodies were created as well as spirits, since the one does not offer any obstacle to the other; and the creation of matter was not unworthy of the great God, as some heretics of old believed, attributing this work to a certain Demogorgon.