yle, which we have just considered, has been left
without a necessary answer. It is likely that, having often before
meditated on this subject, he will have put there all his strongest
convictions touching the moral cause of moral evil. There are, however,
still sundry passages here and there in his works which it will be well not
to pass over in silence. Very often he exaggerates the difficulty which he
assumes with regard to freeing God from the imputation of sin. He observes
_(Reply to the Questions of a Provincial_, ch. 161, p. 1024) that Molina,
if he reconciled free will with foreknowledge, did not reconcile the
goodness and the holiness of God with sin. He praises the sincerity of
those who bluntly declare (as he claims Piscator did) that everything is to
be traced back to the will of God, and who maintain that God could not but
be just, even though he were the author of sin, even though he condemned
innocence. And on the other side, or in other passages, he seems to show
more approval of the opinions of those who preserve God's goodness at [208]
the expense of his greatness, as Plutarch does in his book against the
Stoics. 'It was more reasonable', he says, 'to say' (with the Epicureans)
'that innumerable parts' (or atoms flying about at haphazard through an
infinite space) 'by their force prevailed over the weakness of Jupiter and,
in spite of him and against his nature and will, did many bad and
irrational things, than to agree that there is neither confusion nor
wickedness but he is the author thereof.' What may be said for both these
parties, Stoics and Epicureans, appears to have led M. Bayle to the [Greek:
epechein] of the Pyrrhonians, the suspension of his judgement in respect of
reason, so long as faith is set apart; and to that he professes sincere
submission.

136. Pursuing his arguments, however, he has gone as far as attempting
almost to revive and reinforce those of the disciples of Manes, a Persian
heretic of the third century after Christ, or of a certain Paul, chief of
the Manichaeans in Armenia in the seventh century, from whom they were
named Paulicians. All these heretics renewed what an ancient philosopher of
Upper Asia, known under the name of Zoroaster, had taught, so it is said,
of two intelligent principles of all things, the one good, the other bad, a
dogma that had perhaps come from the Indians. Among them numbers of people
still cling to their error, one that is exceedingly prone to over