O Man! seek no further for the author of evil; thou art he.  There is no evil but the evil you do or the evil you suffer, and both come from yourself.  Evil in general can only spring from disorder, and in the order of the world I find a never failing system.  Evil in particular cases exists only in the mind of those who experience it; and this feeling is not the gift of nature, but the work of man himself.  Pain has little power over those who, having thought little, look neither before nor after.  Take away our fatal progress, take away our faults and our vices, take away man’s handiwork, and all is well.

Where all is well, there is no such thing as injustice.  Justice and goodness are inseparable; now goodness is the necessary result of boundless power and of that self-love which is innate in all sentient beings.  The omnipotent projects himself, so to speak, into the being of his creatures.  Creation and preservation are the everlasting work of power; it does not act on that which has no existence; God is not the God of the dead; he could not harm and destroy without injury to himself.  The omnipotent can only will what is good. [Footnote:  The ancients were right when they called the supreme God Optimus Maximus, but it would have been better to say Maximus Optimus, for his goodness springs from his power, he is good because he is great.] Therefore he who is supremely good, because he is supremely powerful, must also be supremely just, otherwise he would contradict himself; for that love of order which creates order we call goodness and that love of order which preserves order we call justice.

Men say God owes nothing to his creatures.  I think he owes them all he promised when he gave them their being.  Now to give them the idea of something good and to make them feel the need of it, is to promise it to them.  The more closely I study myself, the more carefully I consider, the more plainly do I read these words, “Be just and you will be happy.”  It is not so, however, in the present condition of things, the wicked prospers and the oppression of the righteous continues.  Observe how angry we are when this expectation is disappointed.  Conscience revolts and murmurs against her Creator; she exclaims with cries and groans, “Thou hast deceived me.”

“I have deceived thee, rash soul!  Who told thee this?  Is thy soul destroyed?  Hast thou ceased to exist?  O Brutus!  O my son! let there be no stain upon the close of thy noble life; do not abandon thy hope and thy glory with thy corpse upon the plains of Philippi.  Why dost thou say, ‘Virtue is naught,’ when thou art about to enjoy the reward of virtue?  Thou art about to die!  Nay, thou shalt live, and thus my promise is fulfilled.”

One might judge from the complaints of impatient men that God owes them the reward before they have deserved it, that he is bound to pay for virtue in advance.  Oh! let us first be good and then we shall be happy.  Let us not claim the prize before we have won it, nor demand our wages before we have finished our work.  “It is not in the lists that we crown the victors in the sacred games,” says Plutarch, “it is when they have finished their course.”