There is related an instance of simplicity, which does honour to the heart of an Italian monk. One day, while preaching, this pious man thought he must announce to his audience, that he had, thank heaven, at last discovered, by dint of meditation, a sure way of rendering all men happy. "The devil," said he, "tempts men only to have in hell companions of his misery. Let us therefore apply to the Pope, who has the keys of heaven and hell; let us prevail upon him to pray to God, at the head of the whole church, to consent to a reconciliation with the devil, to restore him to favour, to reinstate him in his former rank, which cannot fail to put an end to his malicious projects against mankind." Perhaps the honest monk did not see, that the devil is at least as useful as God to the ministers of religion. They have too much interest in their dissensions, to be instrumental in an accommodation between two enemies, upon whose combats their own existence and revenues depend. Let men cease to be tempted and to sin, and the ministry of priests will be useless. Manicheism is evidently the hinge of every religion; but unhappily, the devil, invented to clear the deity from the suspicion of malice, proves to us, every moment, the impotence or unskilfulness of his celestial adversary.
76.
The nature of man, it is said, was necessarily liable to corruption. God could not communicate to him impeccability, which is an inalienable attribute of his divine perfection. But if God could not make man impeccable, why did he give himself the pains to make man, whose nature must necessarily be corrupted, and who must consequently offend God? On the other hand, if God himself could not make human nature impeccable, by what right does he punish men for not being impeccable? It can be only by the right of the strongest; but the right of the strongest is called violence, and violence cannot be compatible with the justest of beings. God would be supremely unjust, should he punish men for not sharing with him his divine perfections, or for not being able to be gods like him.
Could not God, at least, have communicated to all men that kind of perfection, of which their nature is susceptible? If some men are good, or render themselves agreeable to their God, why has not that God done the same favour, or given the same dispositions to all beings of our species? Why does the number of the wicked so much exceed the number of the good? Why, for one friend, has God ten thousand enemies, in a world, which it depended entirely upon him to people with honest men? If it be true, that, in heaven, God designs to form a court of saints, of elect, or of men who shall have lived upon earth conformably to his views, would he not have had a more numerous, brilliant, and honourable assembly, had he composed it of all men, to whom, in creating them, he could grant the degree of goodness, necessary to attain eternal happiness? Finally, would it not have been shorter not to have made man, than to have created him a being full of faults, rebellious to his creator, perpetually exposed to cause his own destruction by a fatal abuse of his liberty?
Instead of creating men, a perfect God ought to have created only angels very docile and submissive. Angels, it is said, are free; some have sinned; but, at any rate, all have not abused their liberty by revolting against their master. Could not God have created only angels of the good kind? If God has created angels, who have not sinned, could he not have created impeccable men, or men who should never abuse their liberty? If the elect are incapable of sinning in heaven, could not God have made impeccable men upon earth?
77.
Divines never fail to persuade us, that the enormous distance which separates God and man, necessarily renders the conduct of God a mystery to us, and that we have no right to interrogate our master. Is this answer satisfactory? Since my eternal happiness is at stake, have I not a right to examine the conduct of God himself? It is only in hope of happiness that men submit to the authority of a God. A despot, to whom men submit only through fear, a master, whom they cannot interrogate, a sovereign totally inaccessible, can never merit the homage of intelligent beings. If the conduct of God is a mystery, it is not made for us. Man can neither adore, admire, respect, nor imitate conduct, in which every thing is inconceivable, or, of which he can often form only revolting ideas; unless it is pretended, that we ought to adore every thing of which we are forced to be ignorant, and that every thing, which we do not know, becomes for that reason an object of admiration. Divines! You never cease telling us, that the designs of God are impenetrable; that his ways are not our ways, nor his thoughts our thoughts; that it is absurd to complain of his administration, of the motives and springs of which we are totally ignorant; that it is presumption to tax his judgments with injustice, because we cannot comprehend them. But when you speak in this strain, do you not perceive, that you destroy with your own hands all your profound systems, whose only end is to explain to us the ways of the divinity, which, you say, are impenetrable? Have you penetrated his judgments, his ways, his designs? You dare not assert it, and though you reason about them without end, you do not comprehend them any more than we do. If, by chance, you know the plan of God, which you wish us to admire, while most people find it so little worthy of a just, good, intelligent, and reasonable being, no longer say, this plan is impenetrable. If you are as ignorant of it as we are, have some indulgence for those who ingenuously confess, they comprehend nothing in it, or that they see in it nothing divine. Cease to persecute for opinions, of which you understand nothing yourselves; cease to defame each other for dreams and conjectures, which every thing seems to contradict. Talk to us of things intelligible and really useful to men; and no longer talk to us of the impenetrable ways of God, about which you only stammer and contradict yourselves.
By continually speaking of the immense depths of divine wisdom, forbidding us to sound them, saying it is insolence to cite God before the tribunal of our feeble reason, making it a crime to judge our master, divines teach us nothing but the embarrassment they are in, when it is required to account for the conduct of a God, whose conduct they think marvellous only because they are utterly incapable of comprehending it themselves.