passage 328 of 360 · book with much acrimony. But the accused won his case in a Synod. > V.D.H.) attacking the power of the Governor of Holland, which was at that time considered a danger to the Republic; for the memory of Prince William the Second's attempt upon the city of Amsterdam was still quite fresh.[351] (39/71)
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as those which indicate that God willeth not iniquity, that he willeth the salvation of the sinner, and generally all those which declare that God commands good and forbids evil.
- Mr. Hobbes makes answer to these passages that God does not always will that which he commands, as for example when he commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son, and that God's revealed will is not always his full will or his decree, as when he revealed to Jonah that Nineveh would perish in forty days. He adds also, that when it is said that God wills the salvation of all, that means simply that God commands that all do that which is necessary for salvation; when, moreover, the Scripture says that God wills not sin, that means that he wills to punish it. And as for the rest, Mr.
Hobbes ascribes it to the forms of expression used among men. But one will answer him that it would be to God's discredit that his revealed will [402]
should be opposed to his real will: that what he bade Jonah say to the
Ninevites was rather a threat than a prediction, and that thus the condition of impenitence was implied therein; moreover the Ninevites took it in this sense. One will say also, that it is quite true that God in commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son willed obedience, but did not will action, which he prevented after having obtained obedience; for that was not an action deserving in itself to be willed. And it is not the same in the case of actions where he exerts his will positively, and which are in fact worthy to be the object of his will. Of such are piety, charity and every virtuous action that God commands; of such is omission of sin, a thing more alien to divine perfection than any other. It is therefore incomparably better to explain the will of God as I have explained it in this work. Thus I shall say that God, by virtue of his supreme goodness, has in the beginning a serious inclination to produce, or to see and cause to be produced, all good and every laudable action, and to prevent, or to see and cause to fail, all evil and every bad action. But he is determined by this same goodness, united to an infinite wisdom, and by the very concourse of all the previous and particular inclinations towards each good, and towards the preventing of each evil, to produce the best possible design of things. This is his final and decretory will. And this design of the best being of such a nature that the good must be enhanced therein, as light is enhanced by shade, by some evil which is incomparably less than this good, God could not have excluded this evil, nor introduced certain goods that were excluded from this plan, without wronging his supreme perfection. So for that reason one must say that he permitted the sins of others, because otherwise he would have himself performed an action worse than all the sin of creatures.