arbitrary
decree are adopting that strange idea of mere indifference, and other
absurdities still stranger. They deprive God of the designation _good_: for
what cause could one have to praise him for what he does, if in doing
something quite different he would have done equally well? And I have very
often been surprised that divers Supralapsarian theologians, as for
instance Samuel Rutherford, a Professor of Theology in Scotland, who wrote
when the controversies with the Remonstrants were at their height, could
have been deluded by so strange an idea. Rutherford (in his _Exercitationes
Apologeticae pro Gratia_) says positively that nothing is unjust or morally
bad in God's eyes before he has forbidden it: thus without this prohibition
it would be a matter of indifference whether one murdered or saved a [237]
man, loved God or hated him, praised or blasphemed him. Nothing is so
unreasonable as that. One may teach that God established good and evil by a
positive law, or one may assert that there was something good and just
before his decree, but that he is not required to conform to it, and that
nothing prevents him from acting unjustly and from perhaps condemning
innocence: but it all comes to the same thing, offering almost equal
dishonour to God. For if justice was established arbitrarily and without
any cause, if God came upon it by a kind of hazard, as when one draws lots,
his goodness and his wisdom are not manifested in it, and there is nothing
at all to attach him to it. If it is by a purely arbitrary decree, without
any reason, that he has established or created what we call justice and
goodness, then he can annul them or change their nature. Thus one would
have no reason to assume that he will observe them always, as it would be
possible to say he will observe them on the assumption that they are
founded on reasons. The same would hold good more or less if his justice
were different from ours, if (for example) it were written in his code that
it is just to make the innocent eternally unhappy. According to these
principles also, nothing would compel God to keep his word or would assure
us of its fulfilment. For why should the law of justice, which states that
reasonable promises must be kept, be more inviolable for him than any other
laws?

177. All these three dogmas, albeit a little different from one another,
namely, (1) that the nature of justice is arbitrary, (2) that it is fixed,
but it is not certain that