I.

thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" that is, how Discourse canst thou judge of the things that were done before thou wast born, or comprehend the secret causes of My judgments? -and, "Hast thou an arm like God?"- -as if He should say, Job xl. 9. Why art thou impatient? dost thou think thyself able to strive with God? But that God should punish Job without desert, here. is not a word.

Matt.

III.

xxvi. 24.

PART But in the concrete it is far otherwise; where that of our Saviour often takes place,-"Woe unto that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed; it had been good for that man, that he had not been born." I add, that there is an analogi[Deut. xxv. cal justice and mercy, due even to the brute beasts. "Thou 4.] shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn;" and, "A just man is merciful to his beast.'

[Power to be regulated by justice, not justice by power.]

But his greatest error is that which I touched before, to make justice to be the proper result of power. Power doth not measure and regulate justice, but justice measures and regulates power. The will of God, and the eternal law which is in God Himself, is properly the rule and measure of justice. As all goodness, whether natural or moral, is a participation of Divine goodness, and all created rectitude is but a participation of Divine rectitude; so all laws are but participations of the eternal law, from whence they derive their power. The rule of justice then is the same both in God and us; but it is in God, as in Him that doth regulate and measure; in us, as in those who are regulated and measured. As the will of God is immutable, always willing what is just and right and good, so His justice likewise is immutable. And that individual action which is justly punished as sinful in us, cannot possibly proceed from the special influence and determinative power of a just cause. See then how grossly T. H. doth understand that old and true principle, that "the will of God is the rule of justice;" as if, by willing things in themselves unjust, He did render them just, by reason of His absolute dominion and irresistible power: as 676 fire doth assimilate other things to itself, and convert them into the nature of fire. This were to make the eternal law a Lesbian rulez. Sin is defined to be "that, which is done, or said, or thought, contrary to the eternal law." But by this doctrine nothing is done nor said nor thought contrary to the will of God. St. Anselm said most truly, "Then the will of man is good and just and right, when he wills that which God would have him to will." But according to this doc

[Aristot., Eth. Nic. V. xiv. 7 ;-see above, in vol. iii. p. 303, note 1.]

tum vel concupitum aliquid contra legem æternam." Aug., Cont. Faustum, lib. xxii. c. 27; Op. tom. viii. p. 378. F.]

1.

trine, every man always "wills that which God would have Discourse him to will." If this be true, we need not pray, "Thy will be done in earth as it is in Heaven." T. H. hath devised a new kind of Heaven upon earth. The worst is, it is a Heaven without justice. Justice is a "constant and perpetual act of the will to give every one his own;" but to inflict punishment for those things which the Judge Himself did determine and necessitate to be done, is not to give every one his own. Right punitive justice is a relation of equality and proportion between the demerit and the punishment; but supposing this opinion of absolute and universal necessity, there is no demerit in the world. We use to say, that right springs from law and fact: as in this syllogism ;-Every thief ought to be punished, there's the law; but such an one is a thief, there's the fact; therefore he ought to be punished, there's the right. But this opinion of T. H. grounds the right to be punished, neither upon law, nor upon fact, but upon the "irresistible power" of God. Yea, it overturneth as much as in it lies all law: first, the eternal law; which is the ordination of Divine wisdom, by which all creatures are directed to that end which is convenient for theme; that is not, to necessitate them to eternal flames: then, the law participated; which is the ordination of right reason, instituted for the common good, to shew unto man what he ought to do and what he ought not to do; to what purpose is it to shew the right way to him, who is drawn and haled a contrary way by adamantine bonds of inevitable necessity?

the cause

Lastly, howsoever T. H. cries out that God cannot sin, yet [T. H.'s in truth he makes Him to be the principal and most proper makes God theory cause of all sin. For he makes Him to be the cause not only inevitably of the law, and of the action, but even of the irregularity itself, of sin.] and the difference between the action and the law; wherein the essence of sin doth consist. He makes God to determine David's will, and necessitate him to kill Uriah. In causes physically and essentially subordinate, the cause of the cause is evermore the cause of the effect. These are those deadly fruits which spring from the poisonous root of the absolute necessity of all things; which T. H. seeing, and that neither

tit. i. lex 10.]

PART the sins of Esau nor Pharaoh nor any wicked person

do pro

ceed from the operative but from the permissive will of God, and that punishment is an act of justice, not of dominion only, I hope that according to his promise he will change his opinion.

Argument

of Zeno ;

II. PROOFS OF LIBERTY DRAWN FROM REASON.
NUMBER XIII.

J. D.-The first argument is Herculeum or baculinum, Story drawn from that pleasant passage between Zeno and his necessity of man. The servant had committed some petty larceny, and sin implies necessity of the master was cudgelling him well for it; the servant thinks punishment.] to creep under his master's blind side, and pleads for himself, that "the necessity of destiny did compel him to steal." The master answers, The same necessity of destiny compels me to beat thee. He that denies liberty, is fitter to be refuted with rods than with arguments, until he confess, that it is free for him that beats him either to continue striking or to give over; that is, to have true liberty.

[Answer.]

[Reply.]

T. H.-Of the arguments from reason, the first is that, which he saith "is drawn" from Zeno's beating of his man, which is therefore called argumentum “baculinum," that is to say, a wooden argument. The story is this :-Zeno held, that all actions were necessary; his man, therefore, being for some fault beaten, excused himself upon the necessity of it; to avoid this excuse, his master pleaded likewise the necessity of beating him. So that, not he that maintained, but he that derided, the necessity of things, was beaten; contrary to that he would infer: and the argument was rather withdrawn than "drawn" from the story.

J. D. Whether the argument be "withdrawn from the story," or the answer withdrawn from the argument, let the reader judge. T. H. mistakes the scope of the reason; the strength whereof doth not lie, neither in the authority of Zeno, a rigid Stoic, which is not worth a button in this cause; nor in the servant's being an adversary to Stoical necessity, for it appears not out of the story that the servant did "deride neces- 677 sity," but rather that he pleaded it in good earnest for his own

f [Diog. Laert., vii. 23.]

.I.

justification; nor in the success of the fray; we were told Discourse even now that no power doth justify an action but only that which is "irresistibles," such was not Zeno's; and therefore it advantageth neither of their causes, neither that of Zeno, nor this of T. H. What if the servant had taken the staff out of his master's hand and beaten him soundly; would not the same argument have served the man as well as it did the master?-that the necessity of destiny did compel him to strike again. Had not Zeno smarted justly for his paradox? And might not the spectators well have taken up the judges' apophthegm, concerning the dispute between Corax and his scholar, "an ill egg of an ill bird h?" But the strength of this argument lies partly in the ignorance of Zeno, that great champion of necessity, and the beggarliness of his cause, which admitted no defence but with a cudgel. No man (saith the servant) ought to be beaten for doing that which he is compelled inevitably to do, but I am compelled inevitably to steal. The major is so evident, that it cannot be denied. If a strong man shall take a weak man's hand perforce, and do violence with it to a third person, he whose hand is forced is innocent, and he only culpable who compelled him. The minor was Zeno's own doctrine. What answer made the great patron of destiny to his servant? Very learnedly he denied the conclusion, and cudgelled his servant; telling him in effect, that though there was no reason why he should be beaten, yet there was a necessity why he must be beaten. And partly in the evident absurdity of such an opinion, which deserves not to be confuted with reasons but with rods. There are four things, said the philosopher, which ought not to be called into question: first, such things whereof it is wickedness to doubt; as, whether the soul be immortal, whether there be a God; such an one should not be confuted with reasons, but 'cast into the sea [Matt.xviii. 6, &c.] with a mill-stone about his neck,' as unworthy to breathe the air or to behold the light secondly, such things as are above the capacity of reason; as, among Christians, the mystery of the Holy Trinity: thirdly, such principles as are evidently true; as, that two and two are four, in arithmetic, that the whole is greater than the part, in logic: fourthly,

[Above T. H. Numb. xii. p. 66.] Β [“ Ἐκ κακοῦ κόρακος κακὸν ὠόν.”

Sext. Empir., Adv. Mathem., lib. ii.
p. 81. C. fol. Colon. Allob. 1621.]