29. And doubtless we are so to understand it when Holy Scripture warns us that the wisdom of God is foolishness before men, and when St. Paul observed that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is foolishness unto the Greeks, as well as unto the Jews a stumbling-block. For, after all, one truth cannot contradict another, and the light of reason is no less a gift of God than that of revelation. Also it is a matter of no difficulty among theologians who are expert in their profession, that the motives of credibility justify, once for all, the authority of Holy Scripture before the tribunal of reason, so that reason in consequence gives way before it, as before a new light, and sacrifices thereto all its probabilities. It is more or less as if a new president sent by the prince must show his letters patent in the assembly where he is afterwards to preside. That is the tendency of sundry good books that we have on the truth of religion, such as those of Augustinus Steuchus, of Du Plessis-Mornay or of Grotius: for the true religion must needs have marks that the false religions have not, else would Zoroaster, Brahma, Somonacodom and Mahomet be as worthy of belief as Moses and Jesus Christ. Nevertheless divine faith itself, when it is kindled in the soul, is something more than an opinion, and depends not upon the occasions or the motives that have given it birth; it advances beyond the intellect, and takes possession of the will and of the heart, to make us act with zeal and joyfully as the law of God commands. Then we have no further need to think of reasons or to pause over the difficulties of argument which the mind may anticipate.
30. Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors. Nothing would be so easy to terminate as these disputes on the rights of faith and of reason if men would make use
of the commonest rules of logic and reason with even a modicum of attention. Instead of that, they become involved in oblique and ambiguous phrases, which give them a fine field for declamation, to make the most of their wit and their learning. It would seem, indeed, that they have no wish to see the naked truth, peradventure because they fear that it may be more disagreeable than error: for they know not the beauty of the Author of all things, who is the source of truth.
31. This negligence is a general defect of humanity, and one not to be laid to the charge of any particular person. Abundamus dulcibus vitiis, as Quintilian said of the style of Seneca, and we take pleasure in going astray. Exactitude incommodes us and rules we regard as puerilities. Thus it is that common logic (although it is more or less sufficient for the examination of arguments that tend towards certainty) is relegated to schoolboys; and there is not even a thought for a kind of logic which should determine the balance between probabilities, and would be so necessary in deliberations of importance. So true is it that our mistakes for the most part come from scorn or lack of the art of thinking: for nothing is more imperfect than our logic when we pass beyond necessary arguments. The most excellent philosophers of our time, such as the authors of The Art of Thinking, of The Search for Truth and of the Essay concerning Human Understanding, have been very far from indicating to us the true means fitted to assist the faculty whose business it is to make us weigh the probabilities of the true and the false: not to mention the art of discovery, in which success is still more difficult of attainment, and whereof we have nothing beyond very imperfect samples in mathematics.
32. One thing which might have contributed most towards M. Bayle's belief that the difficulties of reason in opposition to faith cannot be obviated is that he seems to demand that God be justified in some such manner as that commonly used for pleading the cause of a man accused before his judge. But he has not remembered that in the tribunals of men, which cannot always penetrate to the truth, one is often compelled to be guided by signs and probabilities, and above all by presumptions or prejudices; whereas it is agreed, as we have already observed, that Mysteries are not probable. For instance, M. Bayle will not have it that one can justify the goodness of God in the permission of sin, because probability would be against a man that should happen to be in
circumstances comparable in our eyes to this permission. God foresees that Eve will be deceived by the serpent if he places her in the circumstances wherein she later found herself; and nevertheless he placed her there. Now if a father or a guardian did the same in regard to his child or his ward, if a friend did so in regard to a young person whose behaviour was his concern, the judge would not be satisfied by the excuses of an advocate who said that the man only permitted the evil, without doing it or willing it: he would rather take this permission as a sign of ill intention, and would regard it as a sin of omission, which would render the one convicted thereof accessary in another's sin of commission.
33. But it must be borne in mind that when one has foreseen the evil and has not prevented it although it seems as if one could have done so with ease, and one has even done things that have facilitated it, it does not follow on that account necessarily that one is accessary thereto. It is only a very strong presumption, such as commonly replaces truth in human affairs, but which would be destroyed by an exact consideration of the facts, supposing we were capable of that in relation to God. For amongst lawyers that is called 'presumption' which must provisionally pass for truth in case the contrary is not proved; and it says more than 'conjecture', although the Dictionary of the Academy has not sifted the difference. Now there is every reason to conclude unquestionably that one would find through this consideration, if only it were attainable, that reasons most just, and stronger than those which appear contrary to them, have compelled the All-Wise to permit the evil, and even to do things which have facilitated it. Of this some instances will be given later.
34. It is none too easy, I confess, for a father, a guardian, a friend to have such reasons in the case under consideration. Yet the thing is not absolutely impossible, and a skilled writer of fiction might perchance find an extraordinary case that would even justify a man in the circumstances I have just indicated. But in reference to God there is no need to suppose or to establish particular reasons such as may have induced him to permit the evil; general reasons suffice. One knows that he takes care of the whole universe, whereof all the parts are connected; and one must thence infer that he has had innumerable considerations whose result made him deem it inadvisable to prevent certain evils.
35. It should even be concluded that there must have been
great or rather invincible reasons which prompted the divine Wisdom to the permission of the evil that surprises us, from the mere fact that this permission has occurred: for nothing can come from God that is not altogether consistent with goodness, justice and holiness. Thus we can judge by the event (or a posteriori) that the permission was indispensable, although it be not possible for us to show this (a priori) by the detailed reasons that God can have had therefor; as it is not necessary either that we show this to justify him. M. Bayle himself aptly says concerning that (Reply to the Questions of a Provincial, vol. III, ch. 165, p. 1067): Sin made its way into the world; God therefore was able to permit it without detriment to his perfections; ab actu ad potentiam valet consequentia. In God this conclusion holds good: he did this, therefore he did it well. It is not, then, that we have no notion of justice in general fit to be applied also to God's justice; nor is it that God's justice has other rules than the justice known of men, but that the case in question is quite different from those which are common among men. Universal right is the same for God and for men; but the question of fact is quite different in their case and his.