e right or more
exact than this method. For God, having found already among things
possible, before his actual decrees, man misusing his freedom and bringing
upon himself his misfortune, yet could not avoid admitting him into
existence, because the general plan required this. Wherefore it will no
longer be necessary to say with M. Jurieu that one must dogmatize like St.
Augustine and preach like Pelagius.

266. This method, deriving the evil of punishment from the evil of guilt,
cannot be open to censure, and serves especially to account for the
greatest physical evil, which is damnation. Ernst Sonner, sometime
Professor of Philosophy at Altorf (a university established in the
territory of the free city of Nuremberg), who was considered an excellent
Aristotelian, but was finally recognized as being secretly a Socinian, had
composed a little discourse entitled: _Demonstration against the Eternity
of Punishment_. It was founded on this somewhat trite principle, that there
is no proportion between an infinite punishment and a finite guilt. It was
conveyed to me, printed (so it seemed) in Holland; and I replied that there
was one thing to be considered which had escaped the late Herr Sonner:
namely that it was enough to say that the duration of the guilt caused the
duration of the penalty. Since the damned remained wicked they could not be
withdrawn from their misery; and thus one need not, in order to justify the
continuation of their sufferings, assume that sin has become of infinite
weight through the infinite nature of the object offended, who is God. This
thesis I had not explored enough to pass judgement thereon. I know that the
general opinion of the Schoolmen, according to the Master of the Sentences,
is that in the other life there is neither merit nor demerit; but I do not
think that, taken literally, it can pass for an article of faith. Herr
Fecht, a famous theologian at Rostock, well refuted that in his book on
_The State of the Damned_. It is quite wrong, he says (Sec. 59); God cannot
change his nature; justice is essential to him; death has closed the door
of grace, but not that of justice.

[291]
267. I have observed that sundry able theologians have accounted for the
duration of the pains of the damned as I have just done. Johann Gerhard, a
famous theologian of the Augsburg Confession (in _Locis Theol._, loco de
Inferno, Sec. 60), brings f