call the fictions that are not even possible.  As for me, I should have preferred to call them ’beings of non-reasoning reason’.  Also I think that the third section (on wrong elections) may pass, since it says that one must not choose things that are impossible, inconsistent, harmful, contrary to the divine will, or already taken by others.  Moreover, the author remarks appositely that by prejudicing the happiness of others needlessly one offends the divine will, which desires that all be happy as far as it is possible.  I will say as much of the fourth section, where there is mention of the source of wrong elections, which are error or ignorance, negligence, fickleness in changing too readily, stubbornness in not changing in time, and bad habits; finally there is the importunity of the appetites, which often drive us inopportunely towards external things.  The fifth section is designed to reconcile evil elections or sins with the power and goodness of God; and this section, as it is diffuse, is divided into sub-sections.  The author has cumbered himself needlessly with a great objection:  for he asserts that without a power to choose that is altogether indifferent in the choice there would be no sin.  Now it was very easy for God to refuse to creatures a power so irrational.  It was sufficient for them to be actuated by the representations of goods and evils; it was therefore easy, according to the author’s hypothesis, for God to prevent sin.  To extricate himself from this difficulty, he has no other resource than to state that if this power [439] were removed from things the world would be nothing but a purely passive machine.  But that is the very thing which I have disproved.  If this power were missing in the world (as in fact it is), one would hardly complain of the fact.  Souls will be well content with the representations of goods and evils for the making of their choice, and the world will remain as beautiful as it is.  The author comes back to what he had already put forward here, that without this power there would be no happiness.  But I have given a sufficient answer to that, and there is not the slightest probability in this assertion and in certain other paradoxes he puts forward here to support his principal paradox.

27.  He makes a small digression on prayer (sub-sect. 4), saying that those who pray to God hope for some change in the order of nature; but it seems as though, according to his opinion, they are mistaken.  In reality, men will be content if their prayers are heard, without troubling themselves as to whether the course of nature is changed in their favour, or not.  Indeed, if they receive succour from good angels there will be no change in the general order of things.  Also this opinion of our author is a very reasonable one, that there is a system of spiritual substances, just as there is of corporeal substances, and that the spiritual have communication with one another, even as bodies do.  God employs the ministry