on. 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 [94]
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.

36. We may even assume or pretend (as I have already observed) that there
is something similar among men to this circumstance in God's actions. A man
might give such great and strong proofs of his virtue and his holiness that
all the most apparent reasons one could put forward against him to charge
him with an alleged crime, for instance a larceny or murder, would deserve
to be rejected as the calumnies of false witnesses or as an extraordinary
play of chance which sometimes throws suspicion on the most innocent. Thus
in a case where ever