87.
Although men are for ever admiring the wisdom, goodness, justice, and beautiful order of Providence, they are, in reality, never satisfied with it. Do not the prayers, continually addressed to heaven, shew, that men are by no means satisfied with the divine dispensations? To pray to God for a favour, shews diffidence of his watchful care; to pray to him to avert or put an end to an evil, is to endeavour to obstruct the course of his justice; to implore the assistance of God in our calamities, is to address the author himself of these calamities, to represent to him, that he ought, for our sake, to rectify his plan, which does not accord with our interest.
The Optimist, or he who maintains that all is well, and who incessantly cries that we live in the best world possible, to be consistent, should never pray; neither ought he to expect another world, where man will be happier. Can there be a better world than the best world possible? Some theologians have treated the Optimists as impious, for having intimated that God could not produce a better world, than that in which we live. According to these doctors, it is to limit the power of God, and to offer him insult. But do not these divines see, that it shews much less indignity to God, to assert that he has done his best in producing this world, than to say, that, being able to produce a better, he has had malice enough to produce a very bad one? If the Optimist, by his system, detracts from the divine power, the theologian, who treats him as a blasphemer, is himself a blasphemer, who offends the goodness of God in espousing the cause of his omnipotence.
88.
When we complain of the evils, of which our world is the theatre, we are referred to the other world, where it is said, God will make reparation for all the iniquity and misery, which, for a time, he permits here below. But if God, suffering his eternal justice to remain at rest for a long time, could consent to evil during the whole continuance of our present world, what assurance have we, that, during the continuance of another world, divine justice will not, in like manner, sleep over the misery of its inhabitants?
The divines console us for our sufferings by saying, that God is patient, and that his justice, though often slow, is not the less sure. But do they not see, that patience is incompatible with a just, immutable, and omnipotent being? Can God then permit injustice, even for an instant? To temporize with a known evil, announces either weakness, uncertainty, or collusion. To tolerate evil, when one has power to prevent it, is to consent to the commission of evil.
89.
Divines every where exclaim, that God is infinitely just; but that his justice is not the justice of man. Of what kind or nature then is this divine justice? What idea can I form of a justice, which so often resembles injustice? Is it not to confound all ideas of just and unjust, to say, that what is equitable in God is iniquitous in his creatures? How can we receive for our model a being, whose divine perfections are precisely the reverse of human?