fferent aims in different passages, and the same
ways of speaking are more or less accepted or acceptable before or after
the decision of some great man or of some authority that one respects and
follows. As a result of this one may well authorize or ban, as opportunity
arises and at certain times, certain expressions; but it makes no
difference to the sense, or to the content of faith, if sufficient
explanations of the terms are not added.

282. It is therefore only necessary to understand fully some distinctions,
such as that I have very often urged between the necessary and the [299]
certain, and between metaphysical necessity and moral necessity. It is the
same with possibility and impossibility, since the event whose opposite is
possible is contingent, even as that whose opposite is impossible is
necessary. A distinction is rightly drawn also between a proximate potency
and a remote potency; and, according to these different senses, one says
now that a thing may be and now that it may not be. It may be said in a
certain sense that it is necessary that the blessed should not sin; that
the devils and the damned should sin; that God himself should choose the
best; that man should follow the course which after all attracts him most.
But this necessity is not opposed to contingency; it is not of the kind
called logical, geometrical or metaphysical, whose opposite implies
contradiction. M. Nicole has made use somewhere of a comparison which is
not amiss. It is considered impossible that a wise and serious magistrate,
who has not taken leave of his senses, should publicly commit some
outrageous action, as it would be, for instance, to run about the streets
naked in order to make people laugh. It is the same, in a sense, with the
blessed; they are still less capable of sinning, and the necessity that
forbids them to sin is of the same kind. Finally I also hold that 'will' is
a term as equivocal as potency and necessity. For I have already observed
that those who employ this axiom, that one does not fail to do what one
wills when one can, and who thence infer that God therefore does not will
the salvation of all, imply a _decretory will_. Only in that sense can one
support this proposition, that wisdom never wills what it knows to be among
the things that shall not happen. On the other hand, one may say, taking
will in a sense more general and more in conformity with customary use,
that the wise will is _inclined_ antecede