wisdom, goodness, justice and other perfections. _Magnos facile
laudamus, bonos libenter._ This opinion, which despoils God of all goodness
and of all true justice, which represents him as a Tyrant, wielding an
absolute power, independent of all right and of all equity, and [403]
creating millions of creatures to be eternally unhappy, and this without
any other aim than that of displaying his power, this opinion, I say, is
capable of rendering men very evil; and if it were accepted no other Devil
would be needed in the world to set men at variance among themselves and
with God; as the Serpent did in making Eve believe that God, when he
forbade her the fruit of the tree, did not will her good. Mr. Hobbes
endeavours to parry this thrust in his Rejoinder (p. 160) by saying that
goodness is a part of the power of God, that is to say, the power of making
himself worthy of love. But that is an abuse of terms by an evasion, and
confounds things that must be kept distinct. After all, if God does not
intend the good of intelligent creatures, if he has no other principles of
justice than his power alone, which makes him produce either arbitrarily
that which chance presents to him, or by necessity all that which is
possible, without the intervention of choice founded on good, how can he
make himself worthy of love? It is therefore the doctrine either of blind
power or of arbitrary power, which destroys piety: for the one destroys the
intelligent principle or the providence of God, the other attributes to him
actions which are appropriate to the evil principle. Justice in God, says
Mr. Hobbes (p. 161), is nothing but the power he has, which he exercises in
distributing blessings and afflictions. This definition surprises me: it is
not the power to distribute them, but the will to distribute them
reasonably, that is, goodness guided by wisdom, which makes the justice of
God. But, says he, justice is not in God as in a man, who is only just
through the observance of laws made by his superior. Mr. Hobbes is mistaken
also in that, as well as Herr Pufendorf, who followed him. Justice does not
depend upon arbitrary laws of superiors, but on the eternal rules of wisdom
and of goodness, in men as well as in God. Mr. Hobbes asserts in the same
passage that the wisdom which is attributed to God does not lie in a
logical consideration of the relation of means to ends, but in an
incomprehensible attribute, attributed to an incomprehensible n