infer, that God chooses to be offended; that God, who made man,
has resolved that man shall do evil; otherwise man would be an
effect contrary to the cause, from which he derives his being.


73. Man ascribes to God the faculty of foreseeing, or knowing
beforehand whatever will happen; but this prescience seldom turns
to his glory, nor protects him from the lawful reproaches of man.
If God foreknows the future, must he not have foreseen the fall
of his creatures? If he resolved in his decrees to permit this fall,
it is undoubtedly because it was his will that this fall should take
place, otherwise it could not have happened. If God's foreknowledge
of the sins of his creatures had been necessary or forced, one might
suppose, that he has been constrained by his justice to punish the
guilty; but, enjoying the faculty of foreseeing, and the power of
predetermining every thing, did it not depend upon God not to impose
upon himself cruel laws, or, at least, could he not dispense with
creating beings, whom he might be under the necessity of punishing,
and rendering unhappy by a subsequent decree? Of what consequence
is it, whether God has destined men to happiness or misery by an
anterior decree, an effect of his prescience, or by a posterior
decree, an effect of his justice? Does the arrangement of his
decrees alter the fate of the unhappy? Would they not have the
same right to complain of a God, who, being able to omit their
creation, has notwithstanding created them, although he plainly
foresaw that his justice would oblige him, sooner or later, to
punish them?


74. "Man," you say, "when he came from the hand of God, was pure,